Title: Dark Room Series: Pete "Monty" Montgomery
Author: Andrea Kane
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: March 17, 2009
Publisher: Pocket Books
ASIN: B000OVLJQE
On Christmas Eve seventeen years ago, Morgan Winter was traumatized by the discovery of her parents' brutally murdered bodies in a Brooklyn basement. When shocking new evidence overturns the killer's conviction, Morgan is forced to face the horrifying realization that the real killer is still out there.
Trapped between past nightmares and present danger, she hires Pete Montgomery, the former NYPD detective who once promised the helpless young Morgan that he'd find her parents' killer. With nothing more than an old case file and crime scene photos, Monty enlists the specialized skills of his son, Lane, a photojournalist who performs covert image analysis for the CIA. In a cruel twist of fate, they expose the devastating secrets of the dark past, only to discover that while the dead may be buried, danger lives on...
My rating:
On Christmas Eve 1989, then ten-year-old Morgan Winter, discovered her parents's corpses in the basement of her mother's woman's shelter in Brooklyn. The culprit was found and confessed, but the lead detective, Pete "Monty" Montgomery, didn't feel right about the conviction, feeling there was something off.
His gut instinct is proven right just before Christmas seventeen years ago, when irrefutable proof surfaces, the wrong man is sitting in prison for the murder. Morgan, in shock and reeling, hires Monty, now a PI, to uncover the truth, and the real killer panics...
This is the first RS novel by Andrea Kane that isn't labeled as a favorite. It was really quite a chore reading it. It was well-written, the main plot with the cold case and the killer trying his best to make Morgan and Monty to stop the investigation...There was just something off, plain and simple.
The pacing was plodding, mostly because they were dealing with a seventeen-year-old cold case, but some paragraphs with the incessant dialogues, and diatribes about clues and proof, and trips down memory lane grew old pretty fast, and were quite a pain to get through.
The second problem was the romance. Because there wasn't one, no matter how hard Ms Kane tried to convince us otherwise. There was no build-up, no believable (albeit fast) transition between the nice-to-meet-you scene, the first-kiss scene, and the first love scene. They all happened in a blink of an eye, especially the second two; the first kiss happened at his house, and they immediately moved into the bedroom...Even as the things sort-of progressed between Morgan (heroine) and Lane (hero), there wasn't even a whiff of romance, just two characters going through the motion, never really having any time to get to know one another, spend any quality time together, before they were suddenly (and inexplicably) in love.
The suspense was a little better, once it started nearing the end and it picked up the pace. The investigation into the cold case should've been interesting, gripping, and full of mystery and intrigue, but instead, thanks to the above-mentioned lengthy discussions, was rather dull, and hard to keep reading.
The real killer was also quite obvious, although there was a bit of a last-minute surprise thrown into the proceedings; which actually sparked a little enthusiasm on my part.
I think this would've worked better as a short story.
3 stars, Andrea Kane, bodyguard/military/merc/gov/cop/spy, contemporary, contemporary romance, suspense/mystery/adventure/thriller
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