The title fits, kinda. I’m not sure if I‘d call it the Perfect Crime, but it depends on wether the murderer gets caught or not. It is also not very original or nothing standing out from many other crime novels.
Cover : 7/10
The cover looked wonderful and I felt the essence of a crime on it. Maybe not telling much about the story, but the cover looks good.
Blurb : 3/10
The blurb was misleading, not on the information, which you understand once you read the story, but the way you have written it. According to the blurb Jason has closed the murder case in portland to move to a new investigation that instigated a case he had closed and he meet someone he knew while trying to solve the case.
I’m not fully certain if this is because your novel still has a lot more to uncover or not, but upto where you have updated it felt like the story was almost coming to a close, in which case the blurb is very very misleading, if it’s not… then the story needs a lot more evaluation.
First Impression : 3.5/5
So my first impression was neither good nor bad. As a person who doesn’t read a lot of crime I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into the book. The cover, blurb and title did their job in irtuiging me, however it was the hook that didn’t really work for me. There were a lot of mistakes in flow, grammar and emotional constipation that I could tell right off the bat,but I will explain more on all those as we go.
Plot : 9/20
The plot was… consistent for the most part. What wasn’t working was that despite being a mystery thriller, there wasn’t a lot of suspense going around. In fact, there was hardly any suspense going around. I’m not even a fan of crime and I could predict the events about to happen, something you might desperately want to avoid for a mystery/thriller. It was pretty cliche as well, if I have to say. The plot followed a course set out for it, with hardly any obstacles, and no, not knowing who did the crime should not be an obstacle but a given in crime fics. There won’t be a story if we knew who the murderer was. Going through the comment section most likely a lot of people had figured out Ethen was behind the murders almost as soon as he entered the scene. He was suspicious, he knew too much, there was hardly anything left for the reader to puzzle out.
And the inconsistency.There was never any indication that the scene had switched from one to another. No page break, no warning, we were just suddenly thrusted from one scene to another warning and left alone to figure out the scene had even switched.
An example of this was the car scene from chapter two. Ruth and Jason got into the car and they were driving away but people kept popping up to report things to Jason. It wasn’t until a good three paragraphs later I realised that They were no longer in the car but rather the police station (or wherever they work). The reason? You never told us they got out of the car, you never showed them entering the building, there were absolutely no clues at all to their current location. You went about that scene as a continuation without really informing the reader of the setting shift.
