The Trap by Melanie Raabe

The Trap has the kind of intriguing, meta premise that drew me right in. Unfortunately, it was a little like being trapped into reading it. It is a book about an author writing a book to trap the killer of her sister. The main character is a reclusive author and when she thinks she sees her sister's killer reporting the news on TV, she decides to write a crime book and get that reporter to interview her, hoping that reading a book about the murder he committed will get him to confess.

First of all, I feel I should say that this book is pretty weird at points. It has a strange false-start thing early on where you think something is happening (and something that goes on for quite some time) only to suddenly be told by the narrator that they were imagining how something would play out. This felt like a complete waste of my time and instantly made me wary when I was reading anything else that was going on, in case that also turned out to be not real.

The book unfortunately drags a lot too which is very weird given how relatively short it is. It really doesn't have much meat to the story at all and the pacing suffers massively because of it. I thought I would breeze through it due to the length but it turned out to take me longer than usual because there just isn't much going on. Half the wordcount is taken up by the in-story book that the main character is writing and to be honest, I skipped almost all of those sections. Maybe it would have added some extra depth to the story if I'd done more than skim them but from what I did read, it really didn't seem like it.

Overall, I think this book had the potential to be really great but the author didn't know what to do with the premise beyond the basic idea. There is a throwaway line at the end about how the main character hasn't really written a crime story but a different kind of story (not revealed because no spoiler review) and this was clearly meant to be some clever meta commentary on the actual book. However, it just falls flat because really this book isn't any kind of genre particularly. For a thriller, there aren't enough twists or tense moments. The crime aspect is not focused on, nor are any of the relationships particularly developed.  Even for its short wordcount, this book doesn't deliver on the story and for that reason I can't recommend it.

Overall Rating:

.5