Customer Reviews

Graven Images

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This is my first excursion into a Jane Waterhouse book. I found it to be a very satisfying read that kept me turning the pages. When the main character (Garner) is being "wrapped" by Dane, I felt like it was happening to me. The relationship with Garner and father was excellent, though unresolved as many relationships are...particularly with parents. I am looking forward to reading other Waterhouse mysteries.

As Waterhouse's story opens, narrator Garner Quinn, a forceful, driven and highly successful writer of true-crime books, is convinced of the innocence of a young farmboy accused of being a serial killer known as Holy Ghost. She champions his cause and works tirelessly to free him.

Once the young man is acquitted, Quinn, despite her promise to spend time with her teenage daughter, is immediately caught up in her next case. How can she help it when it concerns body parts found in the sculptures of Dane Blackmoor, a romantic enigma Quinn once cast as her father in lonely childhood fantasies? Is Blackmoor a killer? Is Quinn being stalked by the real Holy Ghost?

Although the plot takes several meandering turns, Waterhouse's writing is punchy and vivid, her flawed heroine skillfully depicted, and the ending pulls out all the stops, involving the forces of nature as well as the diabolical workings of a sadistic killer's mind.

Although this is Waterhouse's second book, it is the first in her Garner Quinn series. The protagonist, Garner Quinn, is a well-known author who writes books about true-crime. It can a little difficult to follow sometimes, because Waterhouse jumps back and forth between Garner's past and present, a book Garner wrote about one of her father's clients (Garner's father is a well-known, well-respected lawyer), and two current storylines all being interwoven into one story. This book requires a good deal of concentration (and maybe even a little backtracking) to keep everything straight, but was overall very interesting.

This is the fourth Jane Waterhouse book that I have read. I read two later Quinn Garner books which I liked so much that I decided to read Jane Waterhouse's backlist. I found the characters complex and compelling. The plot was a little bizarre at times, but I found the book hard to put down.

I read two of Jane Waterhouse's more recent books first and I was really looking forward to delving into this one. It started out tremendously and I could barely put it down, but then things seemed to unravel. The guilt or innocence of the Bird man was fascinating, but that plot came to an unfulfilling end. And the body parts in the sculptures, while resolved, still left the reader with tons of questions. I felt like the book could have been 100 pages longer to allow the plots to really develop and draw to a satisfying conclusion. I loved the attraction between Dane and Garner, but even that relationship never really developed. Overall, a good book to borrow from the library, not one I'd necessarily want to make part of my own book collection.

While the plot is full of twists and turns, the characters never emerge beyond the two-dimesional. The author sets up complex relationships between the heroine and her father and daughter, but never develops them at all. The plot has large holes in it; the heroines actions are often inexplicable except in terms of advancing the plot. For example, a policeman comes to her door after her house has been ransacked and her daughter is missing, yet she fails to enlist his help, so that she can be alone when the killer attacks...So many threads of plot are left hanging that the story seems abandoned rather than concluded. Thumbs down.

I really enjoyed the sophisticated pen and hope to see more. Wonderful development -- of each story. Waterhouse created Garner Quinn, a character to whom anyone with an ounce of critical marrow could relate. Garner Quinn could easily live on in subsequent stories -- which could be the flaw with this one. Waterhouse, in her enthusiasm to create a brilliant mystery, actually created two. If it had worked, the brilliance would have been in the glue that held them together. Instead, without any connection whatsoever, other than Quinn's frantic pace of overlapping one crime with another, all that is left is a quick summary, short explanation of why any of it happened at all. I think that with more indepth development of a single plot, further development of her household relationships and the true brilliance of her penmanship, Waterhouse will become one of the best in this genre.

Believe it or not, the "statue mystery" is never completely resolved. The climax of the novel concerns a completely different thread. Despite being portrayed as a strong independent character, the heroine is really a passive victum throughout the text. My guess is that the author had outlines for two different mysteries and threw them together to meet a publishing deadline. Also as a Jersey Shore native, I'd like to remind Ms. Waterhouse that there are no beach-front homes in Spring Lake.