I do like a good three-hour read! I've known that reading would slow down once the semester was underway, but somehow I had forgotten why. Yes, the job and teaching and taking classes are time consuming, but I had somehow managed to forget about rehearsals three nights a week. Orchestra, church choir, and community choir are all back in full swing and that reduces my reading time to almost nothing.
I've been looking forward to downloading this all week. And I did enjoy it. This is not the last of this series, but since I read the last one first, it is the last as far as I am concerned - until she writes another, which I do hope she will. These strike a very nice balance between quirky and seriously grim and depressing. I don't imagine it is a line that is easy to walk. The crimes uncovered in each have been grim, grisly, and gruesome, but her handling of them works. She manages to convincingly deal with the horror of the crimes without getting bogged down in it. Harper is a persuasive heroine who just keeps slugging on through her own doubts and crises.
After the previous one (second in the series, third that I had read), I wondered if twisted families were to be her "thing" in this series. There was certainly a twisted and perverse family relationship in this one, but it didn't seem to be the focus of the story this time. I suppose one might consider Harper's relationship with Tolliver as somewhat twisted, sliding just a hair too close to incest for genuine comfort. Still, as both of them point out to all and sundry, they are not related - her mother was married to his father and they lived in the same household (if you can call it that) for several of their formative years. But compared to the perversity that they discover in their travels, it is the height of normalcy. I guess I will just have to wait for the next to see if the pattern continues.
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