A review by heyitschzva
Indian Summer by Aaron Mahnke

2.0

I felt like this book should have been longer to really build the suspense. The rising action started off well but cut off short with the characters making connections incredibly quickly, and then not running into much issue in the resolution. There are also parts of this book I felt dragged a bit, dispute the story's length. There is an entire chapter which is set at a funeral where it's just all expository dialogue and then the funeral gets one throw away line at the end. The killer seemed very obvious initially but then the focus on this other random event in the character's child hood seemed to shift the focus and when it came back around it didn't feel like it made the right kind of sense. I also really didn't feel great about the killer being this deranged Native American and just the general characterization of Native American's in this story generally. Also the constant references to how warm it was in October was unnecessary to establish that summer was running long. It comes up in almost every single chapter to such a ridiculous degree (pun intended).

I do like Aaron's writing, overall. It is very true to the way that he writes for the LORE podcast, and I would be interested in reading some of his other work.