The Girlfriend: A Novel

The Girlfriend is dark and twisted, and there is certainly a mystery to solve. Those things alone should've made this one right up my alley, and it does have its moments, but I finished it with mixed feelings. The story starts out right in the middle of action and then veers off from there to Abe being in a coma and Mags trying to distinguish fact from fiction. We do get back to the events from the beginning and they do tie in, but it takes a while. From this point on, we get multiple points of view and lots of flashbacks, which are at times, quite difficult to read. I did have a problem with the flashbacks at first and found myself flipping back to the beginning of chapters to be sure of who was doing the telling. In all honesty, I found little difference in the voices of young Mags and young Jody. My biggest problem with this book was that after the initial action, the story moves along at a very slow pace and is loaded with filler. Several times, things that could've easily been summed up in a paragraph took pages. I appreciate setting a scene, but too much detail is as bad as too little, especially when any hint of actual answers isn't part of all that detail. At that point, it just muddies the waters and makes for more convoluted mess than gripping thriller, which does little more than pull the reader out of the story. Fortunately, the story does pick up, but not until the last fifteen percent or so. I will say that I did like the conclusion, but with so much filler, along with the back and forth of the various characters, the getting there often felt more like a chore than enjoyment of what could've been a gritty and gripping thriller.