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Almost Dead

1 rating: 3.0

A book by Lisa Jackson

A Woman Who Wants To Get Even - The first victim is pushed to her death. The second suffers a fatal overdose. The third takes a bullet to the heart. Three down, more to go. They're people who deserve to die. People who are in the way. And when she's … see full wiki

Tags: Books

Author: Lisa Jackson

Genre: Romance

Publisher: Zebra

1 review about Almost Dead

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Almost Terrific

Apr 22, 2010

by DindyRobinson
posted in Cafe Libri: Reviewing Books & More

Rating:

In Almost Dead, by Lisa Jackson, Cissy Cahill's world is already falling apart when her mother escapes from prison and kills the grandmother who raised her. Marla Cahill then sets off on a killing spree that seems to circle ever closer to Cissy and her little boy, BJ. In the middle of a divorce from her husband, Jack, Cissy doesn't know who to trust or how she can protect her son.

I listened to the audio version of this book, and I enjoyed it enough to come back to it three weeks after my version from the library expired so I could hear the final pages. For the most part, I found it to be interesting-- I liked the character of Cissy and of her estranged husband Jack. I even liked the little boy. Jackson threw a major curveball near the end of the story that I didn't see coming, which surprised me because I anticipated almost everything else in the book. I would have rated it higher except for a few things that REALLY bugged me, largely having to do with execution. Jackson was so intent on making this into a whodunnit, that she missed the opportunity to make this a very taut, character driven suspense novel.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

Most annoying of all was a red herring that was so glaringly obvious that I knew there was absolutely no way the person that Jackson wanted us to think was involved could be involved. If she'd put a neon sign screaming "Misdirection" she couldn't have made it more clear. By using an alias to refer to the killer, and then having the killer refer to "my lover" and then plastering huge arrows pointing in one direction, Jackson insulted the intelligence of her readers. Because she was so determined to make us look in one direction, I quickly looked somewhere else, and it was pretty easy to figure out who the killer's friend was.

Because Jackson hammered the novel with her poorly conceived attempts at misdirection, I even figured out her final surprise before the end. So out of her many attempts to manipulate the reader, I only fell for one of them-- and it was a good one, but the sour taste left by the remainder of the manipulation attempts kept me from enjoying the book as much as I should have.

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