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A review by life_full_ofbooks
Locust Lane by Stephen Amidon
3.0
This isn’t a book I’d ordinarily pick up but for some reason it tickled my fancy when I saw it on NetGalley 10 months ago. I finally got around to reading it and while the twisty thriller part was great, that was the only thing that was good about it.
In Emerson, an affluent Massachusetts town, a girl named Eden (from the other side of the tracks) is found dead in a house. The police investigate and find that 3 Emerson teens were the last people with her. No one truly knows what happened to Eden, and while the police are confident they arrested the right teen, a couple of adults decide to prove them wrong.
I have so many issues with this book, but I want to first point out that as as a mystery/thriller goes, it’s very good. It kept me guessing and I was invested in the story.
I realize this is not a legal fiction like Defending Jacob or Mad Honey, but the bits with the defense attorney drove me crazy. I’m not sure how much research Mr. Amidon put into the writing of this novel, but he clearly never spoke with any defense attorneys (or any attorneys for that matter).
Also, I was turned off by the writing style. Short sentences, sentence fragments, and hard to read dialogue can make or break a book, and unfortunately, it broke it for me. I would have given this 4 stars had the writing been a bit better. I was actually quite surprised to learn that this isn’t the first book Mr. Amidon has written because I honestly believed it was. Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon Books for an advanced copy of this. It hit the shelves way back in January.
In Emerson, an affluent Massachusetts town, a girl named Eden (from the other side of the tracks) is found dead in a house. The police investigate and find that 3 Emerson teens were the last people with her. No one truly knows what happened to Eden, and while the police are confident they arrested the right teen, a couple of adults decide to prove them wrong.
I have so many issues with this book, but I want to first point out that as as a mystery/thriller goes, it’s very good. It kept me guessing and I was invested in the story.
I realize this is not a legal fiction like Defending Jacob or Mad Honey, but the bits with the defense attorney drove me crazy. I’m not sure how much research Mr. Amidon put into the writing of this novel, but he clearly never spoke with any defense attorneys (or any attorneys for that matter).
Also, I was turned off by the writing style. Short sentences, sentence fragments, and hard to read dialogue can make or break a book, and unfortunately, it broke it for me. I would have given this 4 stars had the writing been a bit better. I was actually quite surprised to learn that this isn’t the first book Mr. Amidon has written because I honestly believed it was. Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon Books for an advanced copy of this. It hit the shelves way back in January.