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.