Kirsten McKenzie (3)

Well that was a sudden cliffhanger.. Talk about stopping mid-scene. Works for a TV show, not quite so well in a novel. There should have been a bit more of a wrap up/conclusion. This now reads like a single book split into two parts.

Also the actual story (admitted she is jumping about in time) is a bit jumbled, and in spots doesn't clearly delineate when you are changing characters/scenes. Slightly confusing to read. That said the story line does begin to become clear the further you get and it is interesting (I did finish the book). The solution to the postcards strewn throughout the story seems tossed in as an afterthought right before the end (and I mean like a few paragraphs) and not by the MC ..which is odd.

My only other caveat? blurble? is that as things progress she seems to leap into (is she leaping, possessing, something else? not terribly clear as it progresses.. the idea seems to shift a bit) into people who have her first name. There is also the fact her father recognizes her, I could buy the personality change thing, if he'd known who she was supposedly portraying, but no one in that location did. He even says he knows its her, he recognizes her. How could he if she looks like someone else? Also the MC states she can see its him, and goes on about his eyes and etc. Like I say below, indecisive plotting or something else? Either way the scenes in Simla (India) are od in that context. I can see once, maybe twice.. but repeatedly? Nah. Slightly sloppy plotting there, even if the MC has a fairly common name historically. Doesn't detract, just niggles.

Pondering the stars rating.… (más)

Horror isn't a sub-genre I spend a lot of time reading, so PAINTED, being a mystery with a horror overlay, wasn't a book that came with much in the way of preconceptions or expectations. The premise is that when an extremely reclusive artist instructs a law firm on the manner in which is vast art collection is to be distributed after his death, it turns out that the original lawyer that Kubin was used to dealing with has also died, and the firm is now run by his arrogant, money-hungry, insensitive son. Who decides that the instructions from his client aren't worth bothering with, and there's a much cheaper, more expedient way of handling things - send in the assessors and get on with it. The problem with that is that the instructions include a number of "safety measures", that aren't passed on, and therein lies all the trouble.

Set in the classic big, dusty, dark house in the middle of nowhere, the action centres mostly around art appraiser Anita Cassatt who is uncomfortable in the house from the moment she steps into it. There are portraits everywhere, each painted eye watching, and Anita is wrong-footed by that and the building sense of menace. Not knowing that there was safety measures means she's not even aware of the potential of the threat from the very beginning. All of which sets up some horror elements that feel like exactly what is expected. Helped by a setting which comes straight from the classics of horror movies (I can't remember the name of the category and googling to find it threw up a genre series of horror movies under Leprechaun and I'm now so distracted I've forgotten where I was...).

Oddly enough, PAINTED does comes across as a bit of fun in some ways, although the tension is palpable and the ramp up of threat maintained right from the outset. Not being a reader of horror styled novels I'm not sure whether the classic end of episode portend is a standard feature, but early on in the book there's quite a bit of that going on. I suspect that PAINTED has much that will appeal to fans of that style of book.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/painted-kirsten-mckenzie… (más)