Genre: Contemporary Mystery
Date Published: June 2018
Publisher: Little, Brown, and Company
# Of Pages/Listening Time: 466 pages/12 hours
Goodreads | Audible
Synopsis: From New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand, comes a novel about the many ways family can fill our lives with love...if they don't kill us first.
It's wedding season on Nantucket. The beautiful island is overrun with summer people--an annual source of aggravation for year-round residents. And that's not the only tension brewing offshore. When one lavish wedding ends in disaster before it can even begin everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash digs into the best man, the maid of honor, the groom's famous mystery novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, the chief discovers that every wedding is a minefield--and no couple is perfect. Featuring beloved characters from THE CASTAWAYS and A SUMMER AFFAIR, THE PERFECT COUPLE proves once again that Elin Hilderbrand is the queen of the summer beach read.
My Rating:
★★★
.....For being enjoyable, but not totally satisfying
My Thoughts:
I read this book for a reading challenge; otherwise I never would have picked it up. I was mildly intrigued when I discovered that I had watched the author do an interview about this book a few months back on CBS This Morning. Apparently she's never done a mystery before, and wanted to expand her horizons.
....Well, while this book wasn't bad, Elin Hilderbrand might need a little more practice with the mystery genre.
Don't get me wrong, there was a mystery there (how and why did this maid-of-honor die?), but it soon became more of a family drama than a murder mystery; I prefer my mystery novels to focus primarily on the sleuth(s), with family issues in the background, and end clearly and succinctly. This novel just kept dragging through the discovery process, and then sort of fizzled with the conclusion. I was left feeling mildly dissatisfied, and wondering if a happy, sanctified marriage actually exists anywhere; it was kind of ridiculous how many affairs were happening in this novel.
The characters... well, they were okay, I guess. There didn't seem to be a huge amount of depth to them, and I honestly didn't feel connected to any of them, even though one of them was pregnant after a miscarriage (like me right now). As for the writing, that part was fairly good, although it took a while to get used to the time jumps between past and present, along with the jumps between the different points of view of various characters.
Overall, the story did work, and it did hold my interest in a mild sort of way, so it was fairly enjoyable. But, like I said earlier, I don't really go for "beach read" novels; they're not really my thing, and this novel failed to convert me to the genre. Other women might love this book, but it just wasn't for me.
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