Friday, December 16, 2016

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All opinions still remain my own.

Review: Midnight Secrets by Ella Grace

Title: Midnight Secrets
Series: Wildefire
Author: Christy Reece
Read copy: eBook
Published: March 26, 2013
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345538382
ISBN-13: 9780345538383

AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, THE HEAT BEGINS

On a hot southern night, with a storm on the horizon, a family is shattered. Three beautiful daughters—Savannah, Samantha, and Sabrina Wilde—go on with their lives, each significantly changed, as they bear the memory of the murder-suicide that killed their parents. For years, they have stayed away from Midnight, Alabama. Until Midnight calls them home.

Savannah is the first one back, when a grueling case in Nashville leads the young prosecutor to seek shelter in the quiet of the once grand Wilde mansion. But when she finds letters casting doubt on her family’s dark, shameful past, she realizes that peace in Midnight is a shallow façade and sinister secrets lurk beneath the surface. Zach Tanner, once the town’s bad boy, is now the new police chief and still has a wild hold over her. Zach can feel it, too, but he hurt Savannah once. As teenagers, they broke every rule together. Now it’s his job to keep her safe, even though he isn’t sure who her enemies are—or which ones might be his own.


My rating:

Being a fan of the Last Chance Series, written by Ella Grace’s alter ego Christy Reece, this was a true disappointment.

I didn’t like any of it. Nothing.

It was so slow, any slower and it would’ve been moving backwards. The initial backstory of the teenager romance slowed it even more, while all those chapters could’ve been spared .

I didn’t care about the characters, not in the past nor in the present. There was no depth, no personality, no emotion. They were one-dimensional and bland, and I just didn’t feel or see the supposed love between them. In the past they dated because she saw him as some kind of hero and he felt she was the only one who accepted him. Novelty, really. In the present, I felt nothing else drew them together but misplaced guilt, anger, and that heartbreak from so long ago that didn’t exactly scream realistic to me.
Everything was blown out of proportions, and the narrative style (with its incessant repetitions about how he hurt her, how she barely recovered, how that day ten years ago when he didn’t show up shaped them both, blah blah blah) didn’t help one iota. Also, the conflict, if one could call it that, dragged on for too long, and the final revelation was more laughable than anything else.
I suspected the depression angle, but once the whole truth was revealed, I just rolled my eyes and went…”Give me a break!” Too melodramatic, too overcomplicated, and overblown.

The suspense could’ve been the saving grace of this book, but failed to inject some speed into the proceedings and failed to deliver the punch the prologue hinted at. In the end there was no real suspense, no real danger, no portending of evil, nothing foreboding or threatening, and the big reveal fell flat and felt very anticlimactic.



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