My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-fi
Content: Autopsies performed off page with some description of the results, Talk of people being experimented on, Someone's head is bashed in off page with some description of the result
Solve the murder to save what's left of the world.
Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.
On
the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and
three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content
to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what
they're told by the scientists.
Until, to the horror of the
islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to
death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of
the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping
the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog
will smother the island—and everyone on it.
But the security
system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the
night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and
they don't even know it.
And the clock is ticking.
I loved this author's first book, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I also love mysteries, and this one seemed very intriguing because no one in the book could remember what happened. This cover is also gorgeous. Because of those things, I had really high hopes that this would be a book that I would love, despite the fact that his previous book, The Devil and the Dark Water ended up being a dud for me. Unfortunately, this ended up being a huge disappointment. It was a painfully slow, needlessly drawn out story, that at times just went in circles. Most of the characters were hard to connect to, and some were downright
impossible to like or have any sympathy for, despite their
circumstances, which we are never given any real details on. I did like Emory quite a bit, although she and her daughter Clara where the only characters I really liked. For the most part, there was a really dim view of humanity in this book that I didn't like at all.
Emory is tasked with investigating what happened, and from the beginning it was pretty easy to figure out that there was a lot of manipulation going on from a couple of different characters. I don't think it's a spoiler for me to say that because it's so obvious. Most of the time Emory is clueless to things that the reader is in on. She quite often discovers things that we as the readers already know and then no real conclusions or connections are made by her to solve anything. She just picks up clues throughout the book and does nothing very useful with them. Sure she throws out theories on what she thinks happened, but she never really makes any progress on solving anything until the end when suddenly she figures it all out and tells us what happened. The slow pace and the lack of progress was incredibly frustrating. Overall, I figured out most the elements to this book before they were revealed with the exception of how the first death happened, so I guess that was a plus. Only it didn't feel like a plus, it felt anticlimactic.
Lastly, the whole killer fog thing was ridiculous and not ever explained. I saw the twist coming with that a mile away, but the fog itself just never really made sense. Where did it really come from? How was it created? Climate change is just not a good enough explanation. It had all the elements of something from a cheap sci-fi horror flick. Is this author only going to write books I dislike from now on? I hope not but I'm not sure I want to take a chance on another one.
Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for providing me with an ARC of this book.
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