A woman who has no known enemies and friends across the globe.
She’s fun and witty, as everyone describes Gloria McLend-Turner, who was a retired Flight Attendant of Choctaw County, Oklahoma. She’s a widow and mother of two to Julia 21 and Mathew 23. Despite losing her husband, Roger MclLend nearly ten years ago in a hit and run, Gloria decides entering the dating scene once again. She ditches the traditional way of meeting and joins the fad of online dating. Gloria then meets Jackson Turner, a retired Architect, who she marries shortly, six months later to be exact. It all seemed to go extremely well up until their one year marriage Anniversary. What started as a beautiful morning ends with a horrific death of Gloria. Mr. Turner is the one who finds his wife lying lifeless. Surely the husband did it, is the initial assumption, thus as typical Mr. Turner becomes the prime suspect.
Gloria had no known enemies and was liked by many. She was left in pools of blood, which resulted from deep gashes in every area of her body. No weapon was in sight, nothing but a key with a bloody print on it. With a sight so disturbing and little evidence to go on, it leaves investigator Mitchell chasing a killer in almost pure darkness. Mitchell is a new investigator to the Sherriff’s Department Homicide Division, and Gloria’s murder is his first major case, so he has much to prove. Mitchell tries to piece together the crime, but hits pitfalls, when the evidence does not make much sense, and the stories don’t seem to match up. Mitchell learns valuable information from Gloria’s best friend that could change the entire direction of the case, which results into a huge twist, involving a rape kit, toxicology kit, and identity theft.
"Unreadable due to formatting issues around speech"
Reviewer: Reader for Bookangel.
The cover looks good - the standard red and black for murder/horror. The description looks interesting, although the second paragraph is a little repetitive. Unfortunately it does not live up to its promise.
Formatting really lets the book down, and actively makes it harder to read. The speech formatting is really erratic. Some speech has double-line-breaks between speakers, some does not. Some speech is indented and some is not, making it necessary to check for speechmarks to know if the speaker has changed (e.g. loc 69 has speech and response on the same line.) There's also occasional random capitalisation, sometimes use for emphasis e.g. "But Why?" also Loc 69, but it doesn't really work ('CommitTed' ? Really?). The next chapter starts after several linebreaks rather than a pagebreak, which again looks odd as there are the last two sentences from the chapter, a lot of white space and then "Chapter 2" at the bottom.
Initially the writing style is competent, but seemed a little forced. It was very stop and start, rather than flowing well. The grammar doesn't really help, as I found myself distracted by awkward commas and other issues, e.g. a misplaced semicolon "Little did Jackson know; that was the last time..." loc 96 (Semi colons should be used to link two complete sentences i.e. in place of a full stop.
I did look ahead. By Chapter three it is jumping tenses from past to present, in the same paragraph. The spelling and grammar issues dropped the rating to a 2 at most by the start of Chapter two, but when I saw the first paragraph of Chapter 2 I decided to end the review read here. As well as multiple 'says' on the same line and conflicting speech punctuations it has a script style colon mixed with the dialogue tags. It is a DNF.
I can't comment on plot, character or author's style because I haven't read enough. My advice has to be get a) a proofreader but b) even more importantly, get a formatter. Rating:DNF
