Eeny Meeny by M.J. Arlidge

2 Stars

 

“When you’re a prisoner, the days seem endless and hope is the first thing to die.”

Boy I really don’t have many good things to say about this one. Let’s start with the most glaring problem – the entire plot was very much . . . .



The “game” begins when two people are abducted. Once the captives wake up from the sedative they’ve been given they find they are trapped somewhere and left with only a gun and a single bullet. It is up to one of them to murder the other, at which time the survivor will be freed.

Upon the release of the first survivor Detective Helen Grace and the local police force come on the scene – only to realize this will be an endless game of more people going missing and more sole survivors emerging from captivity unless they can figure out who is the mastermind behind the abductions.

According to the blurb, Eeny Meeny was going to be "dark, twisted, thought-provoking" . . . .



Maybe it will be for some of you, but for me it was . . . .



The main problem I had was this was a book that didn’t require a whole lot of pages in order to tell the story. There are books that demand four or five or eight hundred pages for the telling, but a far-fetched mystery is rarely one. Not to mention the choppy paragraph style. A book with 420 pages should not have 100+ chapters. And if it does? The breakdown of said chapters needs to be thought out a lot more than this – multiple narrators, locations, flashbacks, etc. all contained in the same chapter made for very little cohesion.

There was also waaaaay too much talk and not enough action. When you’re not only dealing with a serial killer, but one who gets off on torturing the victims with both the “only one will get out alive” scenario as well as leaving them with zero food or water things could have gotten really twisted. Instead, there was one tasty little scene that made me want to lose my lunch . . .



along with a ton of filler. I get that the main point of this story was to introduce/be able to continue on with the “Helen Grace” character, but when said character breaks ALL protocol, the chances of her continuing her career as a detective would be slim to nill . . . .



And dare I forgot to mention that ending and the “whodunit.” Seriously???? The reader might not have been privy to enough information to figure out the bad guy, but for criminy sake Helen Keller Grace should have known who it was almost immediately. Way to be an awesome detective . . .



ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

Thank you, NetGalley!