Review: Trouble Comes Knocking

Author: Mary Duncanson
Series: No info
Released: November 11th 2013
Publisher: Entangled Embrace
ebook, 179 pages
Source: Publisher for review
Buy: Amazon

It’s hard not to answer when trouble comes knocking.

A girl who can’t forget…

Twenty-two-year-old Lucy Carver is like Sherlock Holmes in ballet flats, but her eidetic memory is more albatross than asset, and something she usually keeps hidden. When she notices that something’s amiss at her dead-end job, she jumps at the chance to finally use her ability for good. That is, until, a man is murdered, and she becomes the target of the killer.

A detective on his first case…

Detective Eli Reyes is overbearing, pompous, way too hot for Lucy’s own good, and seems as determined to ruin her relationship with her boyfriend, John, as finding the murderer. He brings Lucy in on the case, thinking she can help him get to the truth, only to cut her loose when he realizes he’s gotten far more than he ever bargained for.

A past that won’t go away…

When memories from her childhood invade her present, Lucy discovers a mystery bigger than she could have imagined. With the killer still after her, and Eli nowhere to be found, she takes things into her own hands, determined to expose the truth no matter what—before trouble comes knocking…again.

I love that the New Adult genre is starting to stray a bit from the usual format. I’ve stopped reading it altogether because of its repetitive, formulaic nature, but Trouble Comes Knocking seemed different from the start, which is why I decided to give it a chance. Romance is an important part of this story, but it’s not at the forefront. The characters here are young and Lucy still lives with her aunt, but she is out of college, and so are her friends/romantic interests. They have already started living their adult lives.

Lucy is someone I could have liked a lot, were she sufficiently developed as a character, but she wasn’t. The length of the story, which is somewhere between a novella and a full length novel, made proper development of characters and plot virtually impossible. The only thing that was fully developed (which I suppose says enough about the planning of this narrative) was the dreaded love triangle. Lucy has feelings for two men – one she’s allowed to be with, and one she’s not. What bothered me was that she started having feelings for both of them in a matter of days, which made me doubt the quality and intensity of those feelings. It was, however, clear who she really wanted to be with, but that didn’t make me feel any better at all.

The story constantly jumped back and forth in time, between Lucy’s questioning at the police station, and past events she was being questioned about. These jumps happened without any kind of warning, which made them a bit awkward and exhausting at first. Even when it’s well done, it is a narrative technique that never works for me, and it didn’t work now. I would have much preferred a linear story.

The last 10% opened up a whole new story for Lucy, a mystery that will probably be pursued in the next book, if there is a next book. I doubt I’ll read it myself, but I might change my mind once it’s out. If I do, I hope I’ll get a better understanding of these characters; wasted potential always makes me so sad.

A copy of this book was kindly provided by the publisher for review purposes. No considerations, monetary or otherwise, have influenced the opinions expressed in this review.