Reviews tagging 'Drug abuse'

The Fear of Winter by S.C. Sterling

11 reviews

yvo_about_books's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

 Finished reading: January 29th 2023


"Marshall believed lying was a skill, like playing the guitar - the more you did it, the better you became."

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by BookSirens and No Bueno Publishing in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

There was something about The Fear Of Winter that spoke to me immediately. I do love a good thriller with a cold case angle, and I was intrigued by the disappearance and the promise of secrets and a hidden second life. The Colorado winter setting was a bonus, and I fully expected to have a great time with this first book of a new series. Sadly, it turns out that it simply wasn't ment to be. Don't get me wrong, I still love the premise of The Fear Of Winter, but there were certain elements about the execution I simply couldn't get past.

Like I said before, I still think that The Fear Of Winter has a strong premise, and the cold case itself is fascinating. Megan's disappearance hardly left behind any clues, and you wonder how the truth will ever be unraveled... And this is where private detective Marshall and his assistant Hannah come in. Unorthodox methods indeed! I could really appreciate the investigation part of the plot, with the characters not being afraid to face danger and turn to less legal methods to discover the truth. There is also plenty of action especially in the second half of the story, helping speed up the pace which was surprisingly slow in the beginning.

BUT. And here comes were it went wrong for me... One of the main issues I have with The Fear Of Winter has to do with the writing style itself. The story uses a multiple POV structure, which I usually don't mind, but in this case there were just too many different POVs to juggle. On top of this, the switches happened too often within the same chapter (some POVs are hardly a page long before abruptly switching to the next POV), and this both slowed down the pace considerably and made it very hard to create a proper connection to the characters. It took me a long time to keep them all apart, and even after I did the short POVs and constant switches kept bothering me considerably. It just felt like I never got to spend proper quality time with any of them, which is a shame because some of the characters had potential.

As a direct consequence of the plot structure, I felt that I never got to know any of the characters in play well, and their development was mostly riddled with cliches and the most dramatic problematic private life and past possible. Every single one of the main characters had serious issues, which were constantly displayed in a graphic and over the top way... It just didn't feel credible and even bordering the tasteless line at times. I'm not sure how some of them are even functional or capable of investigating something with the state they are in... Trigger warnings are in place for topics including addiction, drugs, alcoholism, self harm, suicide, mental illness and abuse.

I did like how The Fear Of Winter tried to show how everbody grieves in a different way, and how losing someone close to you can affect you. I can imagine the 'not knowing' being even worse, and it eating at you while you desperately try to get answers... I could have done without the cheating angle though, and the consequent emotions displayed didn't feel natural at all either. At least the final part had a lot of action to spice things up a little, but as a whole it wasn't enough to redeem the story for me. I'm sad to say that I didn't enjoy The Fear Of Winter as much as I thought I would... Which is a shame, because the premise did have a lot of potential. 
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