Follow Me Down

Follow Me Down by Sherri Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***
I rated this book a three because it was midway between a one and a five. However I found this novel to be one of extremes. Some things I would rate a five and others a one. There wasn't really much in between.

This is a mystery story - a whodunit - and the plot is very well crafted. By the time you open the book at page one, the murder has been committed, the body found, and the prime suspect missing. We follow the story through the eyes of the prime suspect's twin sister who needs to prove her missing brother's innocence despite all the evidence that builds up to the contrary. So far everything is great as one thing leads to another and the reader cannot wait to turn the page and find out what happens next - sort of.

The problem is that the protagonist is extremely annoying and unlikable. It isn't that she's abrasive. It's just that she has no coping mechanism whatsoever. She responds to every little twist and turn in the plot by collapsing in upon herself. If one were to place her in the Myers Brigg spectrum she would be ESFP. Her logical, rational coping mechanism is non-existent. The author explains her inability to cope by creating a backstory in which she is raised by an alcoholic mother who is also a slut. When things went wrong the mother coped by drowning herself in a bottle and our heroine medicates herself with drugs. The setting is a small town and, of course, there are the proper malevolent dark forces stalking her. By page one-hundred I found myself rooting for the dark forces to finish her off but I knew that there were still another two-hundred and fifty pages to go and no author is going to kill off a first-person protagonist and leave the rest of the book blank. By page two-hundred I was hoping that her brother really was guilty and that she would eventually have her nose rubbed in the fact. Fortunately by page two-fifty things do improve and the last hundred pages were enjoyable. Still, in the early going I would read a few pages, be sufficiently annoyed by the heroine to close the book, but then find myself opening it a few minutes later to read some more because I was hooked on the mystery. With of all these starts and stops it took me over two weeks to finish it.

For those individuals who love a good mystery and don't mind a wishy-washy protagonist I can recommend this novel. However for anyone who values rationality I think I might suggest putting this one aside. The mystery is good, the main character isn't.




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