A review by mommasaystoread
The Empty Bed by Nina Sadowsky

1.0

I must have set this book aside at least a dozen times in the course of reading it, which is a shame because I loved the premise. It's kind of like a free-lance witness protection program, or maybe that should be a witness relocation program. Whichever, I ended up liking the thought of this one much better than the reality of it. It started off well enough, but it quickly becomes convoluted and confusing. The best way I can think to describe this one is that it was just too much. Too many characters, way too much flowery prose, too much going on. Just too much and it ended up being more trouble than it was worth, at least for me. That's not to say that I couldn't keep up. It's just that with so much going on, and so much back and forth between characters, I didn't feel like there was enough time to settle, to get a feel for the characters and become invested in their story. As far as the descriptive, or flowery as I call it, language, I'm all for a thorough description to set a scene or even to give a picture of a character, but really, some things can be left to the imagination. Adjectives and adverbs are important, no doubt about it, but there is such a thing as overkill, and this one had a healthy dose of it. I will admit that I didn't realize this was a series until I'd already started reading, and I honestly don't know if that would've made a difference for me. I can say that if the writing style and flowery language are the same, and since it's the same author, I suspect they are, then I probably wouldn't have made it to this second book.