Her Perfect Murder by AJ Faris ARC
BLURB
A nail-biting suspenseful mystery of betrayal, murder, lies and envy.
Lexi felt so betrayed that she snapped.
And it changed the entire course of her life.
28-year-old Lexi could have had it all, if it weren’t for that fateful night 10 years ago when she was charged with murder.
Now she’s back in her close-knit hometown, Garrison, with a tarnished reputation and a criminal record to match. Her sole mission is to shed her past and learn to live her new life. After all, she already served her time. She spent a decade grieving over what happened to her best friend, even if the details are unclear.
But now that private investigator Zac Booth is in town, her plan of moving on is completely derailed. He’s supposedly in town looking into a disappearance from over ten years ago. Lexi doesn’t see how she could possibly help. She doesn’t want anything to do with another mystery, even if Zac is undeniably attractive. In fact, he’s the first attractive man she’s seen in a decade who wasn’t telling her to get back to her cell.
Either way, she can’t help him.
… Or can she?
The more she tries to escape the past, the more she learns that her past is not at all what she thought it was.
Her Perfect Murder
The story arc is awesome with the blurb beckoning towards an interesting and engrossing tale.
What could go wrong with a protagonist having served time for a murder and now with nowhere else to go she comes back to her hometown to lie low and spend her time below the radar with least interaction with others.
The guilt, the pain that she would be feeling and the difficulty in living in the area where she is bound to bump into people who knew her and know the depth of her crime. This made me take a deep interest in this book. The added bonus of having a PI investigating a death and seemingly her past made the story more intriguing.
I expected to read a lot of pain points, rubbed raw and the protagonist fighting with her past and all that occurred.
AJ Faris has added deep background to the incident and with the PI has woven a tale of multiple deaths, family debts, impersonations and everything else to the mix which would make this a breathtaking ride.
The ride is breathtaking and being a short 200 page novel it moves quickly and smoothly and has a predictable end.
This book had the potential to be a 5 star reading and I am sure some readers would still give it a full five stars but having cut my teeth with thrillers and mysteries all my life, there were chinks in the story which did not deter from finishing the book fast but did make me stumble around in distress at what could have been.
The book, there are some typos and grammatical errors in the initial pages which needed editing but not much in the later pages.
The story moves well in the first half where we dwell upon the past crime and our protagonist Lexi and the multitude of emotions and vulnerabilities that she displays and the ways she tries to avoid any confrontation and meetings.
It is when the PI and Lexi bond to explore and investigate the past and the combined history of their two different but connected cases that the story hits a can of worms.
On one hand the story gets intoxicatingly complicated and there is fun to be had while unravelling a complicated tangle and on the other the story gets well caught in a tangled mass and stuck on the knots. The story goes back and forth too many times and though the gist of the story becomes clear but the process becomes murky within the details and somehow for me the story floundered, turning the book for me into a three star reading.
I felt that the book could have done with a few more pages and the last quarter of the story could have unraveled more smoothly providing a more smoother reading and a more clearer picture of the story.
Deft editing would have ensure this.
Not taking anything from the author, this is a enjoyable mystery and I recommend it to readers.
I have already decided to try another of AJ Faris' books to explore more of her storytelling abilities and I expect other readers like me to do the same once they sample this story.
⭐⭐⭐ Stars
Recommended
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