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A review by nicovreeland
Over Her Dead Body by Susan Walter
2.0
I guess I’m an outlier on this one, but I just didn’t get sucked in. It’s one of those books where there are about 8 different POV characters, and they often retread events we’ve already seen without adding much.
MINOR SPOILERS
The characters also make absurd choices that do not make sense for them (or any human), but only happen because the plot needs a twist. One example: a character tries to call in one of those “if we’re not married by 30, we’ll marry each other” pacts with her roommate, but the roommate just turns and leaves the room. In the roommate’s POV, we learn that he DOES in fact want to marry her, but instead of saying anything, he leaves and immediately buys her a $5000 engagement ring and calls her mother to ask for her blessing. They are not dating and have not talked about dating. It’s a truly bizarre sequence.
Worse, the POV characters often try to manufacture suspense by concealing relatively mundane information from the reader, only to reveal the information later with a flourish.
An example: The woman at the center of the mystery cuts her children out of her will and dies, leaving them surprised and angry. In both the woman’s POV and the kids’, the characters all hide the events that led to their falling out. Finally, after 2/3 of the book is over, the plot needs a “twist” and it’s revealed to us that the old woman had kidney disease and her children refused to give her a kidney, even when she threatened that she’d cut them out of the will.
I found this unsatisfying for several reasons:
1) when the characters decide to hide something from the reader, it always feels like weak authorial intervention to me
2) it’s not that good a twist
And 3) their previous actions don’t make any sense. Why were they surprised and angry when she cut them out of her will? They knew quite clearly that she was going to do just that.
I did like the style, and some of the later twists are better than these, I just think there wasn’t enough material here and so some of it got stretched way too far.
MINOR SPOILERS
The characters also make absurd choices that do not make sense for them (or any human), but only happen because the plot needs a twist. One example: a character tries to call in one of those “if we’re not married by 30, we’ll marry each other” pacts with her roommate, but the roommate just turns and leaves the room. In the roommate’s POV, we learn that he DOES in fact want to marry her, but instead of saying anything, he leaves and immediately buys her a $5000 engagement ring and calls her mother to ask for her blessing. They are not dating and have not talked about dating. It’s a truly bizarre sequence.
Worse, the POV characters often try to manufacture suspense by concealing relatively mundane information from the reader, only to reveal the information later with a flourish.
An example: The woman at the center of the mystery cuts her children out of her will and dies, leaving them surprised and angry. In both the woman’s POV and the kids’, the characters all hide the events that led to their falling out. Finally, after 2/3 of the book is over, the plot needs a “twist” and it’s revealed to us that the old woman had kidney disease and her children refused to give her a kidney, even when she threatened that she’d cut them out of the will.
I found this unsatisfying for several reasons:
1) when the characters decide to hide something from the reader, it always feels like weak authorial intervention to me
2) it’s not that good a twist
And 3) their previous actions don’t make any sense. Why were they surprised and angry when she cut them out of her will? They knew quite clearly that she was going to do just that.
I did like the style, and some of the later twists are better than these, I just think there wasn’t enough material here and so some of it got stretched way too far.