The View from Rainshadow Bay by Colleen Coble

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult, Christian
Genre: Mystery, Romance
Content: Clean


The View From Rainshadow Bay is a mystery with some romance thrown in. There are Christian undertones to it as well. I had some issues with the consistency of the characters, the story, and some things that seemed pretty far-fetched.

As for the characters, I felt like the killer was not consistent. The killer goes from gleefully killing certain people to not wanting to kill others, and uses a different method for every single killing. Also one of the staged accidents would have been near impossible to stage. How would the killer have known exactly where they would be or exactly when to lie in wait?

There are other things like one person tying three men up while holding them at gunpoint with a rifle. There is no way one person could do that and still keep the rifle on the men. The three men could have overpowered that person and gotten away pretty easily.

As for the inconsistencies in the story, one example would be this: there is a package that has something in it that the killer wants, but the killer did not know the sheriff had the items that were in the package, so the killer goes after two different people in the book believed to have those items. But later on suddenly the killer knows the sheriff has these items, but gave one of them back to the main character? That doesn't make sense. Things like this just really annoyed me about this book. And don't get me started on guns being able to shoot off locks and silencers making guns completely noiseless, which is also included in the book. There were just too many inconsistencies and implausibilities in this book for me to completely enjoy it.

This is the second Colleen Coble book I've read. The other was Haven of Swans. I liked it better than this one, and I did not catch the same types of inconsistencies and implausibilities in that one. Other than those issues, so far I feel like her books are a little slow and just not compelling enough for me, especially for a series. Plus this one was very predictable and it was very easy to figure out who the killer was. This is the first book in a series, but I don't see a need for this to be a series, since everything is wrapped up in the end, and it works fine as a stand-alone, so I'm going to leave it at that.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher Thomas Nelson for giving me a copy of this book for review.


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