Fiction by Susan Hunter
Leah Nash is a small-town reporter who screwed up her chance to be a big-town reporter with her aggressive investigating. Now she's trying to investigate a mystery close to home, and --surprise!-- doing it too aggressively.
This book suffered from both Hell-Bent-Syndrome* and I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome.** I didn't love it, but I did want to know what happened at the end...
(See also Close My Eyes by Sophie McKenzie)
This is where the protagonist spends the majority of the book Hell-Bent on solving/getting to the root of whatever the problem of the story is (to the exclusion of everything else in his/her life), while EVERYONE else tells him/her to STOP IT. Many times this path involves the main character getting (or coming perilously close to being) fired, evicted, divorced, disowned, and/or bankrupted, all in pursuit of the elusive TRUTH that he/she is SURE is about to be found.
In real life, this would land our friend the protagonist straight in the looney bin. Think about it: When EVERYONE else's version of reality is the polar opposite of yours, that is called, "You're crazy, dude." (In layman's terms.) But not in the world of the Thriller Novel.
In the Thriller Novel, the sufferer of Hell-Bent syndrome is inexplicably and against all odds proven right in the end, and gets to say "I told you so!" to all the nay-sayers in his/her life who thought he/she was nuts. And then he/she magically recovers everything lost during the downward-spiral portion of the story, like the proverbial country song played backwards. ("You get your wife back, your truck back, your job back...")
This is where the protagonist spends the majority of the book Hell-Bent on solving/getting to the root of whatever the problem of the story is (to the exclusion of everything else in his/her life), while EVERYONE else tells him/her to STOP IT. Many times this path involves the main character getting (or coming perilously close to being) fired, evicted, divorced, disowned, and/or bankrupted, all in pursuit of the elusive TRUTH that he/she is SURE is about to be found.
In real life, this would land our friend the protagonist straight in the looney bin. Think about it: When EVERYONE else's version of reality is the polar opposite of yours, that is called, "You're crazy, dude." (In layman's terms.) But not in the world of the Thriller Novel.
In the Thriller Novel, the sufferer of Hell-Bent syndrome is inexplicably and against all odds proven right in the end, and gets to say "I told you so!" to all the nay-sayers in his/her life who thought he/she was nuts. And then he/she magically recovers everything lost during the downward-spiral portion of the story, like the proverbial country song played backwards. ("You get your wife back, your truck back, your job back...")
**I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome:
(I just thought of this syndrome today, but two books that come to mind to illustrate it are: The Last Lie Told by Debra Webb, If I Could Turn Back Time by Beth Harbison, and The Minders by John Marrs)
This is when the plot twists push the boundaries of believability too far, (such as a long-lost-identical twin showing up at the last minute to take the blame when it had never before been mentioned that the person has a twin) or too often (such as three or four coincidences lining up to reveal the final twist.) You just want to yell out, Oh bull****!
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