A review by byz
Charley's Web by Joy Fielding

3.0

This is not an easy book to review. I couldn’t put it down but the aspects that annoyed me stayed until the end. Fielding does an awesome job at driving the plot forward. Her way of putting a murder mystery into the more usual style of “chick lit” was very engaging. You start out thinking it’s going to be a light read and then some really heavy topics come up. The difficulty is that the characters seemed to act fairly out of character in order to move the plot as necessary and those shifts in behavior weren’t covered off very well. The whole friendship between Charley and Glen, for example, seemed fairly inexplicable with the details we were given. And the details about the abuse and torture of children were somewhat explicit and that added a layer of unpleasantness—a warning would’ve been nice. It makes it harder to recommend the book to a general audience! A great beach read, except when you’re staring into hell.