I first encountered Dickinson’s work via Audible Escape (R.I.P.) in Spring 2020. I loved Tunnels and devoured Devil’s Elbow, but those were the only two available and I thought that was all I would experience of Dickinson. But this summer I was pleasantly surprised when the author reached out to me and offered free copies for review—audiobook copies. Oh. Hell. Yes. She even provided copies of Tunnels and Devil’s Elbow for me to re-listen to and refresh my memory. I could not thank her enough for her generosity. Unfortunately, Leviathan and Summerset were more problematic than their predecessors, but they were enjoyable tales nonetheless. Below are my reviews for the four installments to date.
Book 1: The Tunnels
Not gonna lie, I wasn’t expecting much from this book when I decided to give it a try via Audible Escape. To my surprise, I was utterly charmed by the intriguing story and lovable characters; I also appreciated the humor. Honestly the only thing keeping me from giving this five stars is that it wasn’t longer! There was so much going on, three or four different couples and all their personal drama, that it felt like we just skimmed the surface. There was enough material for a full-length novel here, maybe more than one. It’s actually a testament to Dickinson’s skill that it didn’t feel rushed or crammed, just…small, I guess. So yeah, I really enjoyed this book and wish it could have been more fleshed out.
Book 2: Devil’s Elbow
This was a fascinating tale despite a not-so-good narrator and a few odd writing choices, such as “an appalled look on her face” rather than just “appalled.” What bothered me the most about the narrator was how stiffly she delivered the Native dialogue, as if she didn’t quite know how to inflect it so she forewent all inflection. It made it sound awkward and forced and was distracting. She read the modern-day parts well, though.
One of the few criticisms I had aside from the narrator was that the scene in which the Native woman gets cornered by rapists was unnecessary to include. It was already mentioned and established a couple times before that—actually, it could be that the scene should have been positioned before it was mentioned casually in conversation, perhaps soon after Little Fawn has the thought that the victim wasn’t in her dream. Probably still wasn’t necessary to include another irrelevant POV, though. But it helped build the case against the other tribe… Hmm. Debatable.
I liked all the characters, past and present, though Dickinson could perhaps give Cupcake more of a personality beyond plot device. Lastly, while Tunnels felt like it could have been longer, the length of this one felt appropriate.
Book 3: Leviathan
When I first listened to this story, I knew I’d loved it yet something about it felt way off, I just couldn’t articulate what. So I sat down and listened to it again, this time with fewer disruptions, and realized that while it was another fascinating tale from Dickinson, it was a bit of a mess, too.
First, the prologue was unnecessary. The Young Kylie part didn’t impart anything important that we weren’t told naturally later in the script, and the part with the kids was half irrelevant and again, just unnecessary. Irrelevant in that the lake woman story had, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the plot whatsoever, so it was a misleading false start. Unnecessary because the Native boy could have given us the Mishipeshu (no idea how to spell it since I only listened) information in the scene with the phone game.
Second, problems with the main characters. I appreciate the efforts Dickinson made to give Kylie development and an emotional arc, but it was pretty unbelievable. She runs into a friend she hasn’t seen in several years, the friend gives a completely biased and dated opinion about Jason, and suddenly Kylie takes that opinion as gospel and makes a baseless assumption and dumps her boyfriend of one year over nothing. It made both the friend and Kylie seem petty, shallow, and reactionary, overall unlikeable, which made me sad. Also, what on earth was that blarney about Jason’s age? Why was that a thing at all? I was under the impression that he was around Kylie’s age, but this brought-up-and-then-completely-dropped joke made him sound a lot older than her, which introduced a niggling creepy factor. It was unnecessary, and actually only made the friend’s gossip—and the logic of the situation overall–more tenuous. If he was several years older than them, that puts the girls in middle school if not elementary when he was in high school. What grade-school girl pays any attention to high school guys, much less the sex life of one in particular? If she had an older sister and heard about it a lot at home, maybe, but still, who continues to believe and pass on several-years-old gossip from school? Even if Jason was a lady’s man as a young adult, that doesn’t mean he still is. I think Kylie would have heard or noticed something in the last year if it were true. And if she had distrust/commitment issues, they would have surfaced much sooner than after a year of dating. Then she immediately moved on to some strange guy who otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with the story? Add flighty to the petty, shallow, and reactionary. Yeah, it really was a mess. That’s not to say it couldn’t have worked, but it needed to be developed and executed better.
What I loved about the book was Isa’s story. It was so much more compelling, and Isa was more sympathetic and likeable than her modern-day counterpart. I adore hate-to-love romances, so I was on board with her and John immediately. That arc Dickinson developed and paced really well. She tread close to making John sexist scum, but when it was made clear that he was mostly just getting a rise out of Isa and that he was actually falling in love with her for all the reasons he claimed to dislike—*dreamy sigh* Simply loved it.
The first time I listened, I thought the Jacque and Christopher tragedy was not only a surprise but one that Dickinson hadn’t hinted at at all. The second time I realized there were definitely hints, they were just super subtle and easily explained away. I would have liked the hints to be just a tad less subtle, but generally that aspect was written well, too.
Another problem, however: Dickinson likes to unfold mysteries by switching POVs from past to present; she did it brilliantly in Tunnels and did it well in Devil’s Elbow, too, but here it created problems. There was the unnecessary prologue and there was also a scene from the POV of some guy who had created the tree trunk story to protect the leviathan. There were also a couple scenes from, ostensibly, Sam’s POV. Add in Kylie’s POV, Isa’s POV, the epilogue in the librarian’s POV, and any I might be forgetting. Editors call that head-hopping, and it got to be too much and made the writing feel tangental and hard to follow. It didn’t help when it confused the timeline, too—for example, Sam and Jason are having a beer one evening while Kylie’s out with What’shisface. We move on to the next day, a bunch of stuff happens, then we cut back to that night and Sam’s joining Judy in bed, she says he smells like beer, and they talk about what he told Jason about Kylie. Gotta keep a rein on those POVs; they can become a cheat to easily deliver information. Best to keep them at a minimum so the story stays focused.
So yeah, this book had problems; Dickinson should have cut the trouble in Kylie and Jason’s relationship as well as a couple of the POVs and given more focus to the mystery, but I’m still excited to see what Summerset has in store!
Book 4: Summerset
MASSIVE thanks to the author, who provided a free copy of the audiobook for me to listen to and review.
I liked this book in a general sense, loved revisiting the characters and exploring the mystery, but I got pretty confused the first time I listened; I traced the interwoven vines better the second time. The narrative was as problematic as Leviathan’s was, but in different ways; here the issues are more narrative- and timeline- related than character-related.
The biggest issue that caused most of the confusion—aside from the plethora of “Rob” names, though I think that was deliberate—was Kylie’s imagined circumstances involving Baker and Matthews. The first time I listened I missed the fact that Kylie was only theorizing, so I was really lost. Depicting a theory might work in a visual medium, like in heist movies when we watch the heist unfold as the characters explain the plan in voiceover, but it did not work here. That should have been limited to Kylie saying she thought two convicts might have been involved; did the reader really need to know more than that?
Removing the depiction of Kylie’s convict theory and the unnecessary POVs therein would have helped cut down on head-hopping, but in this book head-hopping issues were actually more about sequence than amount and ties into timeline issues. The 1967-68 timeline needed an overhaul to shift the focus a little and unfold the story in a more emotional way. It would have worked better if mostly linear, perhaps interspersed with moments from the detective’s POV as he investigated, though I’m not sure how necessary those were. We could have watched Livvy and Richie meet, fall in love, and hang out with Mark and Linda; could have watched Jim deal with Dick at work and while Dick talked about his ambitions, establishing the freemason aspect sooner because that seemed to get pulled out of someone’s ass at the last minute and sounded crazier than any of the other theories people had. It would have all built to the inevitable climax, the murders. Yes, the result was already foregone, and it’s really not much of a mystery that jealous and psychotic Jim was responsible, so the human aspect is what Dickinson should have leaned into. The primary mystery would have been the surprising ways those murders impacted the lives of the people connected, then and now, rather than who killed them. Dickinson was halfway there because the story’s twist was human aspect rather than whodunit.
On the character front, Kylie came across much better here than in the last book, though I’m afraid I still don’t like her as much I initially did in the first two books of the series. I acknowledge the efforts she made to empathize with others, particularly her mother, and I actually agree that her mother still acted selfishly despite her troubles (I loved the juicy drama of their relationship and the plot surrounding it), but Kylie nevertheless came across as rather self-interested/-centered herself. It seemed that her greatest concern was about how things affected her or about how she felt about something. She isn’t a horrible person by any means, but I do think Jason deserves better. He is way more into their relationship than she is and seems to make more effort toward it, which makes her comment at the end about going legit crazy if he died ring hollow. By the way, four books in and we know absolutely nothing about Jason aside from his being the fire chief and in love with Kylie. He’s not much more than a plot device at this point, and maybe not even that.
I like Judy a lot as a character in general, but I cringed hard when Judy showed up with a gun and every apparent intent to shoot and kill Olivia. Many of us threaten violence as a way of expressing our fury, of venting it, but a minuscule percentage have any intention of following through, and an even smaller percentage actually do. I would have never expected Judy to actually follow through with her threat, and it seemed way out of character—and way too dark for the tone of the modern-day storyline—for her to try. I’d have loved Judy to confront Olivia and give her a well-deserved dressing-down, but not actually shoot her. Also, it said that there was a gunshot, but we hear nothing more about it. I doubt Judy actually shot Olivia, especially considering we don’t hear anything about Olivia being injured, so what did she shoot at? And why? Also, did she actually get arrested? There were jokes about it but they didn’t help clarify fact from fiction.
The historian dude seemed superfluous, and somewhat related to him, I’m not completely clear on how the murders remained unsolved. He seemed to put everything together easily enough, as did Kylie. Some civilians had their own theories, sure, but the police obviously thought it was Jim. We’re even led to believe that they’d been coming to arrest Jim, and he committed suicide before they could. So… how was it not a closed case? Because they didn’t get a confession? Because a couple small, arguably irrelevant details remained a mystery? The overall conclusion was a bit murky, especially considering Robere (sp?) Roberts was real and no one realized it. I both loved that and hated it; I can’t decide if it was clever or a desperate attempt at a misdirect.
One thing that was clever and fascinating was how Dickinson introduced several theories as to what happened to the Robinsons and showed the reader different meanings for clues simply by changing perspective, such as why the wife’s legs were bare.
Lastly, while Dickinson is a talented writer, she has room for improvement, particularly in deciding when to show and when to tell. Aside from Kylie’s convict theory, a couple examples:
Expository language like “She had a surprised expression on her face” instead of something demonstrative like “Her brows shot up to her hairline.”
“‘Was he a good shot?’ The man shrugged to indicate he was just average.” Not only is there an ambiguous pronoun problem here, but it’s also not necessary to exposit what the shrug meant. If you want to distinguish it from meaning “I don’t know,” then include a few words of dialogue to clarify. Dickinson might have even done that, I don’t recall, but if she did, it isn’t necessary to do both.
Overall, the narrative needed some developmental and line-editing, but it was enjoyable despite its issues and I look forward to Kylie’s next mystery, if indeed Dickinson writes another installment to the series.
