Review: The Book of Cold Cases

I scored an ARC of The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James many months before it's March 2022 publication date and there. it. just. sat. on my Kindle. My eye-ball reading this year has been the pits for a number of reasons, and not even the latest book by an author who is probably now my Top Favorite was pulling me out of my general disinterest.  But finally, I knew it was time. Maybe this would be the book to jump-start me. So I read the first chapter and...didn't pick up my Kindle again for over a week. My plan, she was not going well. But last night I really decided to get serious, hunkered down in bed and proceeded to stay up until 2AM to inhale the book in nearly one gulp.  Which would indicate I loved it, right?  Well....

In 1977 Claire Lake, Oregon was rocked by two random murders. Family men, fine upstanding men, gunned down on an isolated road, strange notes left behind near the bodies. The cops soon zero in on twenty-three rich girl orphan Elizabeth "Beth" Greer. They have no actual evidence against her other than a witness who saw someone resembling her fleeing the second crime scene - oh, and the fact that Beth does not behave like an appropriate twenty-three year old girl. But it's not enough to convict, and Beth is acquitted. She returns to her isolated mansion to live the life of a recluse.

Shea Collins is a receptionist at a doctor's office, which is how she meets Beth Greer. Shea knows she looks familiar and when she realizes who it is, she practically trips over herself to talk to the woman, to try to score an interview. By day Shea is an isolated loner who works a receptionist job going nowhere. By night she runs a popular true crime blog, The Book of Cold Cases, a passionate interest born out of a Shea surviving an attempted abduction when she was a child. Maybe the time is finally right? Maybe Beth sees something in Shea? No matter, she agrees to the interview and soon Shea is visiting Beth in her Creepy AF Mansion, where her mind starts playing tricks on her and everything is not what it seems.

I'm a sucker for a damaged heroine struggling to get through life and determined to solve a mystery, so Shea was right up my alley. Her would-be abductor is in prison, but a parole hearing is coming up - a fact Shea has buried her head in the sand over. She's newly divorced, working a job that's fine but not exactly fulfilling, with a fair amount of guilt and anxiety. The other half of this story is Beth's - starting in the 1960s and building up to the trial and acquittal in the late 1970s.  And here's where we run into a common problem with time-slip novels - I don't like Beth. 

One of the great things about St. James' book is the undercurrent of feminism bubbling below the surface.  The central feminist themes in this book are guilt (good Lord we women have a thing with guilt) and "What does it matter, I'm a girl and nobody is going to listen to me anyway."  Now look, we all know the latter happens.  It happens today in 2022 and it sure as hell was happening in the 1970s - but here's my problem: Beth doesn't even try.  She's stuck. She's a coward. She can't move forward, she can't move back, she can't open her mouth even if it's to save her own skin. And I never bought her logic as to why she kept her mouth shut in 1977.  I get 2022 - because by then her story becomes pretty fantastical - but in 1977?  Yes, guilt and shame but the fact she's not screaming from the the hilltops if only to save her own butt just didn't work for me. Beth became tedious.

What kept me up until 2AM reading was everything else. I liked Shea. The secondary characters are interesting - Shea's sister and brother-in-law, the retired cop who worked the case in 1977, and former cop, now private investigator that Shea develops feelings for (yes, there's a romance but it's very light and secondary).  St. James also excels at writing settings that are frozen in time. The mansion where Beth lives hasn't changed since the 1970s. There's also a ghost (of course there is) who provides suitably creepy atmosphere.  My one solid quibble on the woo-woo is that in the end I felt like the ghost was a short-cut to resolution in place of actual sleuthing.  Should this bother me in a Gothic? Probably not. Does it kind of annoy the mystery reading side of my brain?  Yeah.

What I'm left with is a book that kept me up until 2AM, that entertained me, but that I didn't love. Which isn't really fair. Look, I flat-out loved St. James last two books - so this one had a mountain to climb.  Is it an A+ sort of read that I'll badger people about?  No.  But it's also not "bad."  It's good. And given the current state my eye-ball reading, I'm taking my victory lap.

Final Grade = B