A review by whimsicallymeghan
The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr

3.0

While on the beach one day, Cora Bender stabs a man to death. She admits she’s guilty of the crime, it’s an open-shut case, but the police commissioner believes something else to be at play here. This begins the start of his own investigation on Cora and learning about her secret, dark past and everything in her life that has led up to this moment. This wasn’t a bad book, but it could get really confusing to read and there were parts that the reader just didn’t understand, but they thought that this had a decent plot that kept things interesting. One thing the reader can’t say was that this was boring because it wasn’t. There was always something new developing or changing; but even though it was entertaining, it could be very unclear where the direction was going, or why things were shifting so much. The author had a tendency to switch tenses and to switch up the timelines and so it made it very hard for the reader to catch up sometimes. We would get a good stretch in one tense and the reader would get invested in the story, but then it would shift and become slightly lackluster because it would never shift for the best. It would always go into a point of view and tense that the reader didn’t care about, nor did it really bare any real point to the overall story. The psychological part of the story was really interesting and so the reader appreciated the detours to get there, even if it was a bit of a long journey. The characters were alright; at times the reader really liked them because they made sense, they were developed and absorbing, but there were also times when they could be really frustrating and annoying to read. Plus, some characters went by different names and nicknames that made it very hard to keep track of how everything fit together. The reader didn’t fully connect with them, but they could see where they were coming from and understand some of their motives. In the end though, this was engrossing and captivating that told a very twisty tale.