My Sister's Grave - Robert Dugoni

*** A set of things already seen and predictable twists

My opinion on this book has changed a few times while reading it. The beginning did not impress me, but about halfway through the story I found myself involved in it, and then I was miserably disappointed at the end.

Let’s start with the positive aspects.

Dugoni writes well, there is no doubt about that.

The story flows smoothly, thanks to the evocative environments that cannot help but recall dreary images of familiar disturbing villages in the state of Washington, seen in films or on TV. As I said, around the half of the novel, it was interesting and you want to know how it goes on, as you are hoping for a few twists.

Unfortunately, this hope is disappointed.

In fact, you are faced with a whole set of things already seen, starting with the girl who disappeared/was killed in the village where nothing had happened before, to go on with the classic twenty years old case and to end with the snowstorm coming right in the most dramatic moment of story.

Tracy’s character, the protagonist, is not deep enough and I couldn’t identify in her. I liked Dan’s character, but in the end, he didn’t have so much space in the resolution of the story. He is a victim of the events. In addition, the sentimental development between the two is predictable since the beginning and is shown in a cool way, without involving the reader.

The flashbacks are sad and depressing, sometimes they don’t move the plot forward, they are just there as a dramatic element.

The plot itself is the main problem of the novel. Could it have been that in twenty years Tracy focused on who could not be her sister’s murderer and not on who could be?

The motivations of the characters are very weak, especially of those who sent Edmund House to jail. I can’t buy the reason why they never explained that to Tracy, making her torment herself for twenty years.

The author never takes us to think of whom the assassin might be, so that at one point, I hoped it was one of the characters who appeared by chance or just the most unlikely one, but unfortunately I was wrong. In theory, his intention was to suggest someone by means of the behaviour of the people involved in tampering with the evidence, but their motivation for such action is obvious, so not even for a moment I thought that one of them could have killed Sarah. Only in the last part, Dugoni tries to point to a character in particular, but even in this case, it is evident that the theory does not stand, and at the end of the game, the killer is as obvious as possible.

Moreover, all the while, I was amazed at how a detective in Seattle Murder Squad could not see the obvious.

In the face of all this, I didn’t notice any twists in the story, and in general, many of the events that should have surprised me are in fact predictable, as the author anticipates them or in any case directs them towards more developments that are predictable. After the obvious “revelation” of the murderer’s identity I knew how the story would end, because there was no doubt that Tracy would be saved, being the protagonist and being this one the first book in a series.

Finally, the last chapters are pretty useless. The scenes in which she goes to visit some people in the hospital were avoidable; the same can be said about the epilogue.

In a nutshell, I’m sorry but I have to say that, once I realised that it had no originality or surprise, I found the novel quite boring.

My Sister’s Grave on Amazon.