Shirley Wells- "Silent Witness"

Thank God! The last page!

     Three hundred fourteen has become a very special number to me. Not because it's lucky or is even or is how many times I have found an all red bag of skittles. No, three hundred fourteen is the last page of this grueling mystery novel. I say grueling not because it was so disturbing and made me hold my dog child close. It was damn hard for me to keep reading. This is the first time I have read a Shirley Wells book and apparently by the way the cover brags, this series of Dylan Scott mysteries is pretty popular. Why else would they brag?

   In this particular story, Dylan is hired by his mother's friends to prove that their son has been wrongly imprisoned for his ex-wife's murder. I hated the characters from the beginning. I am not a people person and found myself not caring for any of them. The guy in jail was a jerk, Dylan's wife was a jerk and even Dylan himself was a sexist jerk. Sure he was a good investigator, but I don't care he was an ass.

I get tired just looking at the cover

   By the time it started picking up and alibis started coming apart, I found myself counting down pages. At one point I even found an obvious typo. It wasn't a misspelled word, but the wrong name of a character. To me that was the highlight of the whole book. You just don't see that everyday. A lot of the characters did not need a perspective in the story. It muddied up the plot and made things complicated and unnecessary. This would have been a whole lot more suspenseful and thrilling if it was in first person. 

 Am I being to harsh? Probably, but it's not everyday I find myself looking at the page number before I start reading the actual page. To be fair, the ending was good. I wasn't expecting the outcome, but at that point I was so done with the book I didn't even care. I am going to give this series another try. Maybe this is just an isolated incident. However, I can't say that I loved this book and would read it again. That is pushing it.