Sarah's Library

I received a free Adobe Digital Editions copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley, this has not compromised my ability to write an honest and critical review of the book.

16/11 - Before starting I was worried that this, being the fourth book in the series, would go over my head, as I haven't read any of the previous books.  Usually, I'm a stickler for reading series in order, so I'm going completely against all I believe in when I read Noah's Rainy Day without reading In the Belly of Jonah.  I've only read the prologue, so far, but already I felt the need to start writing my review, to say something about what I'd read.  Noah is a twelve year old with cerebral palsy.  He is an intelligent boy stuck in a prison of a body, waiting for it to betray him even further with broken bones, pain and death.  The prologue is written in Noah's voice and already I'm finding it enthralling listening.  To be continued...

Same day, a little while later - Three chapters in and I'm no longer worried that I'm going to have trouble reading this in the 2.5 days I have before it expires - it's that exciting.  The first chapter was from the PoV of a child abductor and possible paedophile as he watched and waited for another child who needed rescuing to come along.  You see he was abused by his father as a child and now he does everything in his power to rescue other children from their parents, including dressing up in security guard, janitor or park ranger uniforms in order to blend into his environment.  He has done this unknown times before but something has always gone wrong and he's had to start again, 'rescue' another child and take them home with him where they'll have a better life than they could have with their 'abusive' parents.  The child that he's found today, at the airport, is an unaccompanied minor being chaperoned through the airport by an airline employee.  The employee is late to meet his date at one of the airport bars and lets go of the little boy's hand.  He sees this and gets out his lure, a bag of MMs, which he uses to draw the boy into a nearby family-use toilet (one of those large toilets that have the sink and toilet in the same lockable room with enough space to fit a family of four with room to spare).  That would be the most dreadful situation, to entrust your child to an airline employee, who is supposed to accompany your child from one parent's arms to another, only for them to be more interested in their date's anger than the child's welfare.  I would be so angry (angry's not really strong enough a word, but it's the only one I can think of at the moment) at his callous behaviour that if I ever met the employee I might beat him to death with my bare hands.

The second and third chapters follow newly-minted Special Agent Liv Bergen as she attempts to train her new partner, bloodhound Beulah, to find criminals.  Unfortunately, the only thing she finds during this exercise is a hungry mountain lion.  It seems that Special Agent Liv needs some more training when it comes to making decisions under pressure because as soon as the mountain lion leaps at her she drops her hunting knife and big stick and makes a run for it - starting a mountain lion's favourite game, chasing down their prey.  Fortunately, Liv's brother-in-law Michael is in the vicinity playing the criminal for Beulah to find and he's got a gun.  Michael fires a shot that scares the cat away seconds before it can rip her spinal cord out.  As she's picking herself up and Michael's asking her why the hell she decided to attempt to outrun a mountain lion Liv notices a young boy's backpack partially buried in the undergrowth and takes it back to town thinking to try to find out who it belongs to.  If I'm not mistaken this is where the paedophile story intersects with hers (although I could be mistaken, maybe this is just a random find that won't mean anything to anyone for another hundred pages or so), although considering her newness to the FBI I'd be surprised if she was asked to work on a child abduction case so soon, especially not if her nephew is somehow involved (as the prologue suggests may be the case).  To be continued...

The same day, another few hours later - This is great, the writing and different voices are drawing me in and at the end of every chapter I think "Oh, I'll just read this chapter and then go and do...(some random activity)" but then that chapter is so good I use the same reasoning for reading the next chapter, and on and on until suddenly I've been sitting there trying to get away from the laptop for hours.  I have come across a couple of editing problems, including an embarrassing example on page 66 where the word 'waste' is used instead of 'waist' when discussing someone crossing their arms at their waist.  Overall, it's mostly error free, something I've found to be the case with the NetGalley books I've read so far.  NetGalley ebooks seem to be of a higher quality than the free or highly discounted Kindle books, it's always a pleasant surprise after some of the horror stories of editing and plotting I've read from friend's reviews.  To be continued...

17/ 11 - It seems I was a bit premature in my praise of NetGalley ebooks' error-freeness as I'm getting awkward sentence structure, missing words and jumbled sentences that tell me the author was going to write the sentence one way and then changed her mind but neglected to go back and delete the original sentence before starting the new version.  For example:

"...the tiny blue backpack with yellow puppies running and jumping and circling the fabric made me realise I had much a lot of work to do..." on page 101

and

"...an opera singer, before becoming being discovered as a model." on page 99.

If the errors, particularly the jumbled sentences (as they are the cause of much re-reading in order to understand the sentence), continue I might have to deduct half a star, which would be a real shame as this story is pretty perfect for me.  We switch between the 1st person PoV of two characters, Liv and Noah, 2nd person for the occasional scenes narrated by the child abductor and 3rd person to tell the story of other featured characters, like Special Agent Streeter Pierce (such an unfortunate name, I keep thinking streaker).  To be continued...

The same day, a little while later - Yes!!  I'm so excited, Amazon has all the previous Liv Bergen books at only $0.97 each for Kindle.  I might even pay for this one so I can have it to keep and read again after I've read the other three first.  Very, very happy!  I just checked Amazon on a whim, not really expecting to see the three other books from the series, and really not expecting to see them at a price I'm happy to pay for unknown ebooks on a normal day, let alone when it's a book I'm loving more than any previous ebook I've read.  To be continued...

The same day, many hours later - How horrible would it be to be physically unable to say the things you want, in fact need to say?  I get so frustrated on behalf of Noah that he can't communicate easily with anyone other than his nine-year-old sister (who isn't always to be trusted, according to their parents).  Even when he does his best to make the necessary noises to attract his parents' attention, they just talk over him like he's a baby and doesn't warrant the same level of attention as other twelve-year-olds whos powers of speech aren't limited to grunts and groans.  In general, I get frustrated by parents who don't listen to their children, take for granted that anything they say is exaggerated, involves an imaginary friend or are just plain lies.  I'm sure Noah's parents don't mean to ignore him, but I do feel like they could a little more effort into learning to understand what he's saying using Emma's 5-finger-method (which is ingenious for a nine-year-old to come up with).  It's like parents of a deaf child not trying to learn to sign.  How can they ever hope to have a connection with Noah if all communication has to go through his younger sister, who they don't trust not to make up stuff?  Oooh!  I could just shake them.  To be continued...

18/11 - Finally!!  Liv and the rest of the FBI team have realised that Little Max's abduction had nothing to do with his parents, their money or anyone that has ever known him - it was a true 'stranger abduction' by a truly crazy man.  I thought they'd never get it.  Now we just have to make it through some very frustrating scenes of Noah's parents not understanding him or taking what he saw seriously enough.  I can now see that there's a much bigger connection between Liv and the kidnapper than just finding a missing backpack (although I am wondering if the backpack belongs to one of the kidnapper's previous victims, who, once they made him angry enough, were 'set free' in the woods), the kidnapper actually lives next door to her sister Frances, and her husband Gabriel.  I've only got 100 pages of what looks like nail-biting, speed-reading because I need to know what happens action, but it's 1:30 am and I have to get up at 8.  I don't think I can pull another almost all nighter like I have been doing all week in order to get my 'about to expire' NetGalley books read before they disappear off my laptop.  This is the best of the four I had to read by the 18th,  but my eyes feel like they're full of sand and my bum has gone numb from sitting up in bed for the last four hours - I'm sure they're both signs that I need to go to sleep ASAP.  To be continued...

19/11 - FANTASTIC!!  The best ebook I've read (admittedly, I've only read about 20 due to my normal aversion to them, but still).  I loved Noah, he was honest and intelligent and savvy to the ways of adults.  His attitude and bravery beyond that of most adults helped me to forget that he had cerebral palsy - that he couldn't communicate with most people, couldn't physically save Little Max.  The way Noah was observant of sights, smells and sounds around him made me think about what most of us observe, or don't as the case may be, on a daily basis.  The little things that might be important, but because we're too busy doing stuff we don't notice them, .but I'm sure Noah would.  I did continue to notice little editing/grammar errors but none as bad as the two examples I gave above, so I've only deducted 1/2 a star for that.  Besides those niggly little errors this book was pretty much perfect.  I found the Liv's voice completely distinct from Noah's, it didn't feel like the same person speaking just with a different name heading their chapter, I felt like I was hearing the thoughts of two completely different characters and it was great.  I don't believe you have to have read the previous three books, I mean it would have been nice if I had, but it's definitely not necessary to enjoy this book.  I would favourably compare this to my favourite crime writer Patricia Cornwell and I would be interested in owning the paperback set.  I can't wait to read more of Brannan (I just hope they live up to the expectations set by this book), but they're not at the top of the list as I have other not-long-from-expiring NetGalley books to read first.