It’s been a while since I have blogged a book review. This month Amazon suggested a lot of suspense books for my free Kindle book, and it was hard to choose just one. I chose “The Thinnest Air” as it seemed like a fun mystery to get into, the disappearance of a young socialite in a ski town.
One of the best parts of the book is use of two narrative voices – Meredith who has disappeared and her sister, Greer. Meredith narrates from her honeymoon onward and Greer narrates from the present day. This way we get lots of details of who Meredith was before her strange disappearance and the mystery and tension build as we follow Greer as she tries to piece together who is responsible and if Meredith is still alive or not.
As many books do, there are some characters who are well fleshed out and others who we only get some details of. For this reason it is likely that some one or more of the well developed ones were part of the disappearance, though the book does keep you guessing. Many readers will be able to piece together whoodunit, but I did not. I can’t even remember one of the main characters names afterwards, only that it was an unusual name.
The book was very fast paced for the first half, I stayed up later than I should have getting through that part. It was even a great background distraction while I pumped milk for one session.
This being said the book had quite a few flaws. One of the biggest is that for the story to work at all Meredith had to not confide in her sister a lot of what was going on in her life, even though both Greer and Meredith said they were close. This is even more unbelievable as she did confide in a few other people in ways that created the whole situation of the disappearance.
The book involved characters acting out in ways that were just unbelievable. This was again required for the story to work, yet felt false. Two major characters had to act completely different in the second half than the first.
Lastly, the ending felt rushed and completely counter to other information we’d been given from the behavior of many characters. It’s possible that that is how people would react given how the disappearance is resolved, yet, it feels unlikely with what we’ve heard about the characters up until that point.
Rating – two baby booties out of five
Over 40 First Time Mom 