Book Review: Or Else by Joe Hart

I’m having a hard time reviewing this one as much of the time I'm not really sure what kept me reading. Not to say I didn’t like it, I enjoyed the style quite a lot, so maybe that was it. The quiet neighborhood of The Loop  gets turned on its head when a body is found and the man's wife and children are missing.

We follow Andy, a novelist taking care of his father who is succumbing to Alzheimer's. He writes crime fiction and has now found himself the center of something that could be the crazy plot of one of his books. That missing woman, he was having an affair with her, and a mysterious note shows up letting him know that someone knows about them.

It’s slow paced, even for domestic suspense, despite lots going on. There is not just one dead body, but three; ranging from what seems like accidental to suspicious causes. [note here - I nearly stopped reading when we prattled on about Mary being killed by her horse - I'm not sure the author has ever met a horse or someone who knows about them, his plot here based on only the flimsiest ‘things people know about horses’ and made me roll my eyes numerous times. Also, he couldn't even get the vocab right. *sigh* I did like the horses' names at least.]

There are lots of players to keep Andy, and us guessing, but there just wasn't the tension that I want from a thriller. I'm not one to try to guess the ending as I read, but I had a pretty good grasp on where parts were going regardless.

Overall it was well written, and I liked the moments that were a little meta where Andy talked about his writing, but there wasn’t much for me to hold on to and remember, or that makes me want to shout about this book from the rooftops. At the same time I don't regret reading it, so there’s that.