****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Hilary's "Someone Else's Skin" is a good debut but it does have some rookie flaws. Four stars seems a bit too generous, three would be too harsh. But it gets high marks for diverting from the usual patterns of a murder mystery. For one thing there is no murder! Unless you want to quibble about the death of heroine Marnie Rome's parents five years earlier, and then too, there is a suspicious suicide. But aside from all that, there is no dead body, no autopsy, forensics, SOCO investigation, etc. etc. Rather, much of the story ostensibly deals with women as victims of abuse. There are some long scenes at a women's refuge, a "safe" house of sorts, where the husband of one of the residents has just been stabbed. How did he know where the house was? How did he get in? Why did he bring a knife? How did he get stabbed? Why do the resident witnesses provide conflicting descriptions of events? Interesting questions to pursue, but there's more, a lot more. The reader also learns the stories of other residents, particularly a Middle Eastern woman blinded in one eye by her brothers as punishment for supposedly looking at a boy. Slowly, as more and more of the case details emerge and personal histories are revealed, the story takes an unexpected turn or two and it becomes clear that women are not always just the victims but occasionally the instigators of violence on others. So, high marks for a very interesting story line.Now for the flaws....Although the author has created some unusual characters, including a gay sidekick, they all seemed rather flat to me, too cardboard. I didn't feel I knew them after finishing the book. I wasn't real crazy about the prose either; I suppose it was adequate but nothing special. The characters as cops didn't seem real enough, hopefully the author will research police departments, environment, organization, procedures and lingo a bit more for book two. It seemed like she put all her energy into researching other areas for this book. The word "skin" must have been used more than 100 times. It felt like a tip from a writing class, a trick to add a little depth, some hidden meanings.....yuk. And the name, Marnie Rome, sounds like something from a cheap made for TV movie, but I guess we're stuck with that. Marnie visits her parents' jailed killer every so often, and I suspect that will be back in book two. Those kind of links from book to book in a series can become boring and too repetitious after a while; we'll just have to wait and see. For me it's reminiscent of a popular series where our hero is haunted by a boyhood incident, the unsolved death of a younger brother; it comes back in every book in the series, every book - I finally gave up. Finally, the ending was too pat, too convenient. I would have done it 180 degrees differently and I would have had a bit more respect for the author if she finished on a more jarring note. Will I read the followup, "No Other Darkness" due in 2015? I'm not sure yet, but I'll certainly notice the banner, " #2 in the MARNIE ROME series" !
