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A review by ayundabs
Her Final Hour by Carla Kovach
3.0
Thank you to NetGalley for giving me an Advanced Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.
Detective Gina Harte returns in her second book after a vacation to find that a brutal murder of a woman occurred. The woman was killed with a laundry line and strangled to death while her infant daughter was crying in the other room, and her husband was drinking with his friends at a bar. From then the detective and her team has to figure out whether the abusive shady husband is the killer despite the alibi, while the killer might be killing other victims.
This novel is a combination of detective, police procedural mystery and domestic thrillers that has been booming lately. As a person who likes both, I personally preferred the detective side of the story in this particular one. I really liked Gina as the main character. This middle aged woman is not just a smart and hard working detective - she is caring, and despite the fact that she has quite a lot of personal issues in her past she was professional as hell, and I really admired her spirit throughout the entire novel.
The crime itself was also interesting, mainly because we read from the perspective of not just the detective but also the perpetrators. At first because we read a lot of different perspectives we might be a little unsure of who exactly did what, but after a while we'd get the gist of the crime. So it wasn't really about a whodunnit story, since the readers already know who did it. Instead we root for the protagonists, for the detectives and for the victims to serve justice to the people who did it. And it's a unique take that was fun to read. However it did therefore lack the element of surprise. Yet the plot was unpredictable, with not just one murder mystery to solve but separate side plots slightly related to the main murder. I personally thought these side problems weren't very interesting and the story would've been more interesting and fast-paced without it, especially the plot regarding Ellie.
Overall, with great characters and an interesting crime, overall this book was a fun, enjoyable read. The crime itself honestly wasn't groundbreaking and neither are the killers. There weren't any huge major plot twists and nothing really blew me away. Added to that were the various mistakes found in the writing itself. Granted, this is an ARC and it's understandable that punctuation marks would be missing or there would be spelling errors. However some of them (like the lack of an exclamation mark when a person is shouting, for one example) slightly disturbed the flow of the story. Additionally the writing style wasn't anything spectacular either, as we can find in a lot of thrillers they are straight to the point and lacked any beautiful prose.
In conclusion, this novel was an enjoyable little mystery book. It has a great protagonist and it's definitely a page-turner. However it didn't serve to wow me or blow away my mind with its premise, plot, nor its execution of the story. As a person who haven't read the first book of the series I was still able to keep up with the story. So I would recommend this for someone in need of a detective, domestic, mystery thriller.
Detective Gina Harte returns in her second book after a vacation to find that a brutal murder of a woman occurred. The woman was killed with a laundry line and strangled to death while her infant daughter was crying in the other room, and her husband was drinking with his friends at a bar. From then the detective and her team has to figure out whether the abusive shady husband is the killer despite the alibi, while the killer might be killing other victims.
This novel is a combination of detective, police procedural mystery and domestic thrillers that has been booming lately. As a person who likes both, I personally preferred the detective side of the story in this particular one. I really liked Gina as the main character. This middle aged woman is not just a smart and hard working detective - she is caring, and despite the fact that she has quite a lot of personal issues in her past she was professional as hell, and I really admired her spirit throughout the entire novel.
The crime itself was also interesting, mainly because we read from the perspective of not just the detective but also the perpetrators. At first because we read a lot of different perspectives we might be a little unsure of who exactly did what, but after a while we'd get the gist of the crime. So it wasn't really about a whodunnit story, since the readers already know who did it. Instead we root for the protagonists, for the detectives and for the victims to serve justice to the people who did it. And it's a unique take that was fun to read. However it did therefore lack the element of surprise. Yet the plot was unpredictable, with not just one murder mystery to solve but separate side plots slightly related to the main murder. I personally thought these side problems weren't very interesting and the story would've been more interesting and fast-paced without it, especially the plot regarding Ellie.
Overall, with great characters and an interesting crime, overall this book was a fun, enjoyable read. The crime itself honestly wasn't groundbreaking and neither are the killers. There weren't any huge major plot twists and nothing really blew me away. Added to that were the various mistakes found in the writing itself. Granted, this is an ARC and it's understandable that punctuation marks would be missing or there would be spelling errors. However some of them (like the lack of an exclamation mark when a person is shouting, for one example) slightly disturbed the flow of the story. Additionally the writing style wasn't anything spectacular either, as we can find in a lot of thrillers they are straight to the point and lacked any beautiful prose.
In conclusion, this novel was an enjoyable little mystery book. It has a great protagonist and it's definitely a page-turner. However it didn't serve to wow me or blow away my mind with its premise, plot, nor its execution of the story. As a person who haven't read the first book of the series I was still able to keep up with the story. So I would recommend this for someone in need of a detective, domestic, mystery thriller.