So lately, I’ve been pretty pleased at myself for being able to stop a book if I didn’t really like it (my current reading model is “life’s too short to waste it on books I don’t like). Which makes Playing Dead a bit of an outlier; there’s plenty of things in the book I don’t particularly like, but somehow, I made it all the way to the end of the book even though I had plenty of reading alternatives.

In Playing Dead, Tommie’s life is upended when a mysterious letter arrives, claiming that she’s a kidnapped baby. Since her father just passed away and her mother has dementia, finding the truth isn’t as easy as asking a question. But when Tommie starts to dig, she realises that her past is tied to a bunch of murders and the mafia. Oh, and there are people after her so her life is in danger too.

So, things I didn’t like about the book:

Firstly, the romance. I know it’s a subplot and I know it’s probably my bias showing, but the romance was so predictable. Tommie’s ex-boyfriend comes in, he’s super protective and all that, and eventually they give in to their feelings (which never actually went away). I didn’t really buy the romance here.

After that, Tommie makes lots of mistakes despite having a PhD in psychology and apparently being trained in self-defence by her family. Oh, and her family is huge in their town and they have tons of connections. Despite all this – a contact in the press, a lawyer who can make banks move, the ex-boyfriend who knows the FBI without being part of it – Tommie still rushes into things and makes mistakes that had me rolling my eyes at times. It’s almost as though she’s a character in a horror movie.

And then we have the plot. This was the main reason that I kept reading, but towards the end, I just felt really let down. I mean, I didn’t really like Tommie or how she seemed to not make use of her family connections well or the romance but I really, really wanted to find out the truth behind the mystery. But as it turned out, several of the plot threads ended rather anti-climatically. I’m not going to say which, but at least two of the players in the mysteries turned out to be red herrings and their motivation for even participating in the mystery was thin. The actual truth was interesting, but it felt I was promised so much more in the beginning. (It just occurred to me: Is this what fans of Lost felt when the show ended?)

So overall, I wasn’t very happy with this book. I think the premise and the blurb set up my expectations a bit too high. That said, I kept reading till the end, which means that at the very least, this book knows how to keep the pages turning. I’m not sure if I would recommend this, but it wasn’t a totally bad read.