Sometimes you win with bargain book purchases, but sometimes you find mediocre ones. This was one of those times. Again, I’m not saying anything was outright bad with Sara Blaedel’s novel, The Midnight Witness, but I’d say if you ask me next month what this was about I couldn’t tell you much of anything.
Part of the problem might be that this was the ninth book in a series featuring the lead character, Louise Rick. But, I always think back to James Patterson’s novel, Mary, Mary, where I started with that famous character. He was able to fill in enough backstory that nothing was confusing and then also gave me a chilling and awesome plot. Blaedel was able to do a decent job of filling in some background information, but ultimately, the plot wasn’t that compelling. We were told right away that there were people dead and then there was just a lot of filler before slapping down the people responsible for their murders.
Apparently in this novel, Rick is still pretty new in the homicide department of a police force in Denmark. That part was at least cool. She’s more concerned about finding out what’s happened to a young woman who was found dead in a park close to her home. Instead, she’s forced to work on a case involving a murdered journalist and on top of all that, is to work it with a new partner. I don’t like that we don’t learn much about him throughout this whole book, but I can tell that he will likely be her permanent partner in future installments. Don’t quote me, but it seemed obvious. I think Louise also has a serious conflict of interest because her best friend is a journalist at a well-known paper! Camilla is constantly pressuring her for information on cases and usually Louise gives in!
Aside from the unprofessionalism there, I didn’t think the dialogue in these novels was very good. Everything that was said between Louise and Camilla felt surface-level, and the same thing could be said with her and her serious boyfriend, Peter. Louise comes across as very stubborn and honestly rude a lot of the time! I don’t know if this is normal behavior for people from Denmark, but she was kind of standoffish. The best dialogue came mainly when she was sussing things out in her head. I can’t see how that would bode well for a long-term career in the police force, but I guess this character has been making it work since 2005. As I said before, the ending wasn’t surprising and came and went in under ten pages!
While I’m sure the first few novels of the series are probably quite good, I can’t see myself dedicating anymore time to this character. If you like any sort of crime novel though, this might be worth checking out.