Implausibility piling upon implausibility -- and, as far as I can see, to very little purpose.
This starts with an implausibility: a woman is is so anxious to avoid interacting with the authorities, when her husband tumbles down the stairs and dies, that she contrives to make the death look suspicious, and herself like a murder suspect; she goes on the lam, acquiring and losing false identities as she goes. Having said that, I thought at first that the implausibility of the opening chapter was just intriguing enough -- why would she do that? -- to keep me reading. I was wrong.
It goes downhill very fast after that -- the protagonist's meandering from bar to diner to used car lot are as boring as they sound. Flashbacks, in the form of "mysterious" emails to someone from her past, who was involved in some unpleasantness back in her hometown, are so so pointless and repetitive that I quickly started skipping them altogether. There are a few bursts of, shall we say, decisive action, as if Lutz realizes that she'd better try to keep the reader's attention, but they make no sense at all. Not physically, not psychologically ... not practically.
For example, the protagonist -- whose work experience to date consists of bar-tending, uninspired housecleaning, and messing up a perfectly straightforward accidental death -- uses fake documents she had acquired to become a primary school teacher, at a private school in a small town in Wyoming that is so desperate to hire anyone that the headmaster ignores little things like no references and sketchy to non-existent documentation. Someone, like her publisher, really should have told Lutz that, in this day and age, no one gets through the door of a school, and anywhere near the children, without thorough police checks. I suspect that's true, even for the dodgiest of small faith-based schools in the tiniest, most remote of small-towns.
It was at that point that "intriguing" segued over into "very annoying," and I decided that I had no further time for an author who doesn't respect the intelligence of her readers ....
This starts with an implausibility: a woman is is so anxious to avoid interacting with the authorities, when her husband tumbles down the stairs and dies, that she contrives to make the death look suspicious, and herself like a murder suspect; she goes on the lam, acquiring and losing false identities as she goes. Having said that, I thought at first that the implausibility of the opening chapter was just intriguing enough -- why would she do that? -- to keep me reading. I was wrong.
It goes downhill very fast after that -- the protagonist's meandering from bar to diner to used car lot are as boring as they sound. Flashbacks, in the form of "mysterious" emails to someone from her past, who was involved in some unpleasantness back in her hometown, are so so pointless and repetitive that I quickly started skipping them altogether. There are a few bursts of, shall we say, decisive action, as if Lutz realizes that she'd better try to keep the reader's attention, but they make no sense at all. Not physically, not psychologically ... not practically.
For example, the protagonist -- whose work experience to date consists of bar-tending, uninspired housecleaning, and messing up a perfectly straightforward accidental death -- uses fake documents she had acquired to become a primary school teacher, at a private school in a small town in Wyoming that is so desperate to hire anyone that the headmaster ignores little things like no references and sketchy to non-existent documentation. Someone, like her publisher, really should have told Lutz that, in this day and age, no one gets through the door of a school, and anywhere near the children, without thorough police checks. I suspect that's true, even for the dodgiest of small faith-based schools in the tiniest, most remote of small-towns.
It was at that point that "intriguing" segued over into "very annoying," and I decided that I had no further time for an author who doesn't respect the intelligence of her readers ....
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