Customer Reviews

Identity Crisis

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Good Stuff:

I have found that with first-time Indie authors who try their hand at crime/mystery novels, a lot of them have plot holes you could drive a semi through. That is not so with this one.

The reader follows Sam, the main character, through the investigation of a case that involves murder and identity theft. Every time Sam has an "Aha!" moment, the reader can "Aha!" right along with her. The plot is finely tuned to keep the reader enthralled throughout.

There were no editing errors that I can remember. This was definitely of publishable quality.

The Bad Stuff:

The characters, even Sam, fell a little flat. Not horribly so, as you will care about them while reading the book, but they are easily forgettable afterward.

Overall:

This is a wonderful first book, and the author should be truly proud of her accomplishment. I will definitely be looking forward to future work from this author.

Length: Full Novel: 3,748 locations on the Kindle

Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual situations.

Debbi Mack's first novel, Identity Crisis, had me hooked from the first page, and proved to me by last page that she is a mystery author to contend with. She builds a tight and compelling plot in this noir murder tale, while managing to pace the story so nicely that I never once felt bored. And there's a great twist that I just didn't see coming - and I'm usually pretty good at spotting a twist from a mile away.

Of course plot and pacing are important in any mystery, but I'm a reader who loves a good character above all else, and that's what topped it for me with Identity Crisis. Sam MacRae is smart, gritty and independent with a wry sense of humor, even about herself. But she doesn't necessarily have it all together - she has her issues like we all do. She's human. And she's very likeable.

I have seen that Mack will soon be releasing a second Sam MacRae novel, and I for one will be one of the first to purchase, I can guarantee that!

"Identity Crisis" establishes Sam McRae, hard-boiled lawyer turned investigator, as a spunky sleuth who tackles her own identity crisis while investigating murder and identity thefts linked to client Melanie Hayes. High-speed chases, break-ins at a seedy strip club, and violent Mafia-linked connections keep this well-crafted novel on an adrenaline roller-coaster ride through some of the more interesting Baltimore neighborhoods and suburbs. An unusual surprise ending had me checking previous pages to see where I missed the clue. Debbi Mack did an awesome job on developing the characters as well as the dialogue. I totally enjoyed "Identity Crisis" and breathlessly await Sam McRae's next intriguing, and paying, mysterious client with a past.

This is a very short book with a plot that is not much developed. One woman wronged in the distant past is very believable. But two is a crowd. There is a mob connection that is not credible: a near death by torture is followed immediately by business as usual, before a deus ex machina (a car crash) eliminates this thread.

The identity theft theme is not developed well. It is a good idea to build a plot around this new, scary and ubiquitous crime. The author should have taken the time and energy to learn something about identity theft, to add some meat. This is a salad book, not a meat and potatoes book.

I think it is worth buying at the Kindle price by those who like mysteries.

This is the sort of book I call a "why bother?"-book. While not exactly bad, it has really nothing to recommend it and make it stand out from the mass of average writing flooding amazon every day. All the characters and especially the heroine felt like they were living behind a glass wall where you cannot get a grip on them. I could not sympathise, let alone identify, with any of them.



SPOILER!



I liked the idea of the wanted suspect actually being the murder victim, although I feel this could have been made more of. On the other hand I thought it totally unbelievable that the heroine gets beaten up so bad she has to be hospitalized and no one - not a one! - asks her what has happened to her and why. Totally unrealistic, as this would be the first thing anybody would ask.

I downloaded this for my Kindle for free or 99cents (don't remember, not worth looking up) and wanted to like it . . . I finished the book only because I was on travel and my flight had been delayed for a couple of hours. As other reviewers have stated there was the possibility of a great plot here, but there were some places where the ball was just dropped by the author . . .

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

So, why was there a POBox with her name on it and mail to someone else? What WAS in that envelope? How did it relate to the case?

As reviewer "Kete" stated, how could she get kidnapped by the Mob, beaten so badly as to require a one week stay (I had surgery in March and they only let me stay for 2 nights and I had bones removed and replaced!) and NO ONE ASKS ANY QUESTIONS???? She didn't report THAT to her friend the cop, but she's reporting that she follows someone to the airport? And while we're at the airport, what happened to the guy who went to the airport and what was his part in the whole thing? And once the Mob guys were in the automobile accident, everyone else in the Mob just forgets about her and she doesn't have to worry anymore? HUH?????

If it's free for your Kindle and you might get caught in airport delays, it's probably worth the download.

However, having said all of that, having lived in the area where this book was set, I would read another offering from Ms. Mack, hoping that she would have better writing, plot development, editing, consistency in her next story.

Like her other book, Least Wanted, this one has too many characters and it is too hard to keep track of them. Plus some of the story lines do not seem plausible. I would not read any more of her books, if she writes them.

I'm sorry, I don't understand how this book got such good reviews. I kept trying to get interested, but it actually put me to sleep. I gave up about 3/4 of the way through. I just didn't care how it ended.

It was a fun read but there were a couple of holes in the story. The biggest one being when Sam gets beat to a pulp and spends a week in the hospital. There is no mention of the police being involved or of the medical people questioning just how she got her injuries...would just not happen that way. By the apparent fact that there were no police investigating, it impacts how the rest of the story unfolds. Hopefully in future novels she will pay more attention to details of this sort.

Debbi Mack's debut novel, "Identity Crisis," has a lot going for it. It's a well-written, briskly paced, plot-packed detective mystery that makes strong but subtle use of its Chesapeake Bay-area settings held my attention for the most part. Overall, it's a few cuts above the majority of self-published fare.

Unfortunately, it's a little too packed with plot -- to the extent that the final act goes off the rails, with way too many scenes in which way too much is explained. I found myself jumping back and forth, trying to make sense of who did what to who and for what reasons, and not often succeeding.

And what's explained most of all is that most of the mystery in the preceding pages was a red herring that distracted from a solution that no reader of "Identity Crisis" could possibly have anticipated. That, in my opinion, cheated me as a reader out of the "Aha! Fiendishly clever! I should have figured that one out!" moment that makes good mystery fiction so satisfying.

What was ostensibly a tale of identity theft and murderous greed -- and a very complicated one at that, filled with shifting money, drifting evidence and possible double-crosses by the bucketful -- gets almost completely tossed aside in favor of a story of personal vengeance that comes out of nowhere. It all culminates in an overly talky climactic scene in which the killers, peripheral characters to that point, all but stop the action to explain. And explain and explain and explain.

The overall impression I get is that the author lost the handle on the plot and had to scramble to tie together several loose strands of plot.

I'd almost be OK with that if I cared more about the characters, but the book's heroine, Sam McRae, is not particularly well-developed. She's a lawyer who seems to have only one client -- someone who starts off being charged with murder and ends up almost completely offstage -- and seems to forget her canon of ethics as often as not. Some of the things she does, like being ahead of the police in questioning the owner of a strip club that appears to be run by a couple of scam artists or not reporting a mob beating that hospitalized her for a week, stretch plausibility to the breaking point.

The shadings of her character seem to be cobbled together from other detective novels -- a cat, a crappy car, a caretaker neighbor and a complacent lover among them -- and don't add up to anything compelling. (I did appreciate that the developing new love interest, a competing investigator, was nicely underplayed.)

All that being said, I admired Mack's grasp of genre craft, and was glad to see that she ensured her novel received strong story-editing and copy-editing. While I was disappointed in "Identity Crisis," I also see that Debbi Mack knows her stuff. So I'll give her, and Sam McRae, another chance in the next book in this series, the just-released "Least Wanted."