Well. I have rather mixed feelings about this book. A young boy is found murdered in a street, nine of whose residents are the immediate suspects. It’s up to Detective Cady Lambert and her sidekick to find out the connection between the suspects and the victim and which of them had sufficient reason to want a young teenager dead. Probable causes are many: drugs, theft, abuse…and more. So many secrets. For a whodunnit, however, the detectives make few appearances.

The book is rather long: too long, especially when it’s extremely hard to feel anything for any of the characters. There are chapters in third person POV, punctuated with chapters in the first-person POV for each of the suspects. But they are nameless…they are merely Suspect 1, Suspect 2, etc. It was very difficult to apportion any sympathy, dislike even, for anonymous characters.

More annoyingly, there’s a plethora of howling errors: spelling and grammatical. Annoyingly, because the author is actually a not-half-bad writer: his descriptions of people’s mannerisms in particular were very good. But the dialogue was inconsistent, the plot is rather convoluted and there is some very clunky phrasing. I just didn’t like the constant use of inverted sentences like ‘to the back she went’, which seemed totally incongruous to the author’s otherwise intelligent style.

I suspect that this was self-edited. I would urge the author to find a good technical and developmental editor, who could shave twenty percent off this novel and tighten up the errors. A lesson in the difference between 'lay' and 'lie' might well be at the top of the list, as well as when to use ‘they’re’ and when to use ‘their’, that thirst is slaked, not slated. Perhaps a dictionary would help solve the enigma of spelling words like cacoughany (yes, really).

I would also recommend checking a few facts. Us Brits do actually use electric kettles, Mr S. We’re quite civilised. We have pavements on roads and everything.

A half-decent plot, some stylish writing, but the frayed edges need some heavy-duty trimming.
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Shady Lake seems like any other suburban neighborhood in Ohio. It's residents host regular barbecues and potlucks and plan weekly shopping outings; a generally tight knit group. When a teenage boy is found dead on the street, viciously stabbed and strung up from an end of summer BBQ banner across the lane, everyone is on high alert. There is a killer living on the lane. Everyone is hiding secrets, and with the appearance of a man on the roof in the dead of night, the police have no end to the number of suspects....

This book hurt my brain....in a good way. It was like a mash up of Murder on the Orient Express and Desperate Housewives. While I was confused at the beginning (there are A LOT of characters to keep up with) it was fairly easy to keep everyone straight once I got on a roll reading. The book was written in third person with interspersed chapters written in first person from the perspective of all the characters living on the Lane (who were subsequently suspects in the teenage boys murder). To say these chapters were shocking would be an understatement, I may never look at my neighbors the same- ha! Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) was hiding a secret. I felt I did a pretty good job figuring out who was who along the way, but of course there were the twists I just did not see coming (which is always amazing). My only gripes are that a) it was a tad long to me and b) I did not understand the significance of the man on the roof. No spoilers, but that whole sub plot confused me. I think I may know what was going on there but I'm not 100% sure. Regardless of these two things, I absolutely enjoyed this one!

Overall, a solid thriller read; full of scandal, intrigue, and the perfect amount of shock and awe while reading. Would definitely recommend for all my psychological thriller fans out there! ( )