Fiction by Lisa Scottoline
At the beginning of this book, Dr. Noah Alderman is on trial for the murder of his stepdaughter Anna. There seems to be an awful lot of evidence against him, but he maintains his innocence. Then the story goes back in time a bit to explain what happened before.
So the first 300 pages went that way: a chapter about the progression of the trial and then a chapter about the backstory: how Anna had unexpectedly come to live with her mother and Noah and had immediately begun stirring up trouble.
The whole setup gave me a bad case of Oh-No-I-Can’t-Look Syndrome**, because Noah and his wife were making glaring mistakes in dealing with Anna’s manipulative tactics. Anna was obviously aiming to set Noah up as the bad guy, and everyone played right into her hands. Still, it didn’t make sense that she’d ended up murdered.
That is, it didn’t make sense until we got to the twist. After that, the story got really interesting! (finally) I just don’t know why it took us 300 pages to get to the twist; the whole book is less than 400.
So this was a good book at the end, if you can get through the (long) beginning.
I also read recently by this author: What Happened to the Bennetts
** Oh-No-I-Can't-Look Syndrome
(See The Southern Book Club... by Grady Hendrix)
That's when you know a main character is making a major error in judgement that's going to have huge and terrible consequences.
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