I really struggled to get into this book. The Girl from Widow Hills is the story of Olivia, a woman who famously survived a flash flood as a child and changed her identity to escape the press. Her past comes back to haunt her when she finds the corpse of someone relating to her past in her garden and she becomes involved in a murder case. The main reason I couldn't get into this book is I found the plot both linear and hard to care about. The main character keeps the reader at a distance and that made it incredibly hard for me to either sympathise with her or trust her narration. I spent the whole book just waiting for her to actually let me in on what was going on properly.
I also found Olivia's relationships with the other characters very odd. She had a previous romance with her college professor but he was involved so little in the story that I kept forgetting he existed. She might have bene trying to start a romance with her work colleague but I couldn't tell if it was meant to be romantic, even with the main character stating she might like to date him. This links back to the way Olivia was written and me not trusting what she was telling the reader. I didn't buy her relationship with her colleague and it felt like she was plotting something she wasn't letting me know about. Finally, she has a friendship of sorts with her neighbour Rick. At first I was also unsure if this was romantic, especially given that she is stated to prefer older men. It is platonic but again, I never really felt or understood the connection between the two of them.
The plot itself is fine in terms of content, but I never felt particularly compelled or intrigued by it. You don't really know what is going on but the book also doesn't encourage you to try and guess either, meaning that as a reader I was disconnected. On the surface this is a fine enough thriller but I think Miranda has much stronger books (The Perfect Stranger, Fragments of the Lost) and this just didn't do enough for me personally. It's a shame but I still look forward to reading her other books.
Overall Rating:
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