Book Review: Dead of Winter by Lee Weeks

Dead of Winter by Lee Weeks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was promoted for free on Kindle and Apple Books in this week’s eNewsletter by Simon & Schuster (26.NOV.2018). It’s the first in a crime thriller series written by Lee Weeks (2012) and I’d never actually heard of the author or her books before getting the email. Nice bit of marketing because I downloaded the freebie and bought the next book (#2) in the series.

‘Dead of Winter’ is a plot-driven thriller that kept me turning the pages. It’s about a brutal cold case sitting dormant for 13 years, when a single fingerprint appears at another murder scene linking the two crimes. The story unravels piece by piece and the author builds a nice amount of suspense as each chapter ends.

The characters are believable and have enough human traits to keep you invested in their welfare and the story. And the story works. Yeh there’s a few cliches and convenient co-incidences that help the story along, but it had enough surprises to keep us readers interested. Plus it leaves a few unanswered questions about the back story of central character Ebony Willis (who I wish her offsiders would call Ebony occasionally instead of Ebb all the time) to get you curious about the next book.

Good holiday or commute read. I’m keen to read part two.

PS: I gave the book only 3/5 stars for two main reasons:-

1. there is more than a few typos in the Kindle edition and expected better from a major publisher like S&S. Mixing up gendered pronouns and using the wrong word in a sentence in any book is sloppy work, but in thrillers it pulls the reader out of the story.
2. the narrating voice chopped and changed a bit. It’s not that I don’t like getting a perspective from all the characters, but (like the typos) it pulled me out of the story when the narrator was inconsistently in the head/thoughts of different people. Sometimes I wondered who the protagonist was supposed to be.

If you found this review helpful, you can check out my other book reviews as well.