Book Review: The Fault Tree by Louise Ure

Stars: 2 out of 5
Pros: The main character and her family and friends

Cons: Everything else

The Bottom Line:

Characters are good

But the plot does not serve them

With so many holes

This Books has Some Flaws

The Fault Tree is the second stand alone thriller from Shamus Award-winning author Louise Ure. While I don't normally read thrillers, the premise sounding interesting, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was rather disappointing to me.

Five years after a car accident left her blind, Cadence Moran has adjusted to her new life. She lives alone a few blocks away from her job as an auto mechanic. And as strange as that sounds, she is one of the best at her job.

One night, walking home, Cadence hears a muffled scream and then is almost run over by a car. When she hears that one of her neighbors was murdered, she puts two and two together and realizes she heard the murderers leaving. So she does the responsible thing and steps forward with the information she has, including the mechanical problems the car has.

Unfortunately, the police don't take Cadence's comments too seriously. Even more unfortunately, the culprits do and start to come after Cadence. Can she help the police? Will the police catch the killers before they come after Cadence again?

The book started off well, and I found the basic premise interesting. The author does a good job of bringing the world of a blind woman to life, which helped draw me into the story.

What makes this book interesting is the multiple points of view used to tell the story. We get first person narration from Cadence. These scenes are great at describing things uses the other four senses. The book switches quite frequently to third person narration from the police or the villains' points of view. These are seamless, and I had no trouble following them at all.

However, this is the first strike against the book. We know early on who the killers are and what is happening, so watching the police stumble around trying to catch up with what we know is rather boring. In fact, I think the scenes from the villains' point of view should have been dropped until late in the book. That would have created more suspense then what we have in this book.

The pacing isn't the only strike against the plot. There's a red herring developed early and then dropped, only be to wrapped up with a sentence near the end. Sorry, but for all the development it got, it needed a better resolution then that.

Finally, there's the climax. I'll admit, I was hooked and stayed up pretty late to find out what happened next. However, I was also shaking my head trying to determine why certain characters were behaving as they were. It really made no sense to me. Plus, the final showdown wasn't quite believable. I went back and forth on whether or not I believed things could happen as they did. The author tries to make is plausible, but I really don't buy it.

Even the characters are hit and miss here. The two police detectives working the case never really stood out in my mind. I couldn't remember which was which the entire way through the book. The villains were pretty stereotyped. I think the main reason that bugged me was because it hit a little too close to home for me, which is a personal problem, I'll admit. Fortunately, Cadence was a good character. She was well developed and interesting, and I loved spending time with her. Her relatives and friends were also great, so any scene she was in was worth reading.

While Cadence was enough of a good character to give the book an added star, the rest of The Fault Tree felt like an early draft that needed to get some bugs worked out rather then a final novel.