The first 37% dragged so much that it took me straight into a reading slump

I think this is a series that you can’t start in the middle. With so many characters and the backstory of the main character, I felt like I was pushed into cold water and told to swim like hell to catch up. 

I did enjoy the mystery but with so much time spent on trying to get some background info I couldn’t get into it as much as I hoped.

I would still pick up the books of this series though! Loved the setting in Alaska 

You know that feeling when you’re loving your current read and want to ignore all adult responsibilities? 

Yeah that’s how I felt with this one 

My kind of fiction with an dash of magical realism  

The beginning started off promising with the body was found, but then it dove straight into confusing subplots. 

I think this is a series you have to read in order, or you’ll be confused by all of the characters 

I stand by my original question: 

Did Edward Cullen (or Stephanie Meyer) lock Ashley in a room until she finished this?

This read like a Twilight x Duggar religion x Vampire Diaries fan fiction and if I wanted that, I would open up AO3. 

There is no way the writer of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and The Last Housewife (both five stars) wrote this hokey mess. 

I think this could have been successful if Winstead had dived deeper into a religious paranormal thriller instead of taking the lane of religious coming of age small town romance. Even if it had just been a cultish, revenge thriller it would have been so much better. 

While I see what Winstead was doing, making Ruth a naive religious girl to make her have a coming of age/coming to awareness moment, but that plot device is so overused. This almost read like a YA with how naive Ruth was. 

There are so many random, weird scenes that went on that nothing made sense. 

Also, a drug empire in a small town? How novel. Not overused at all. 

This was not a thriller, but I'm not even sure what to categorize it as. 

The characters had the personalities of cardboard and the book club that was promised barely appears. This is not a book about books