Death by Honeymoon

This book is so bad I couldn’t finish it. The situations in the book and the actions of the characters are unbelievable. The protagonist, a woman whose husband died on their honeymoon, makes snap judgments about people and events and then is upset and confused when people doubt her conclusions. For example, after coming home after the accident, based on no evidence whatsoever, she decides that her husband must have been murdered, basically because the husband had promised to never leave her. Similarly, Skye creates a one dimensional, bizarrely antagonistic family of the deceased husband, who think and act ridiculously, in order to add tension to the story. Moreover, the writing is seriously flawed. Scenes and thoughts jump around in no understandable order. One specific event really irritated me; in the first few chapters, on two occasions, the protagonist recounts her thoughts about the time when she met her husband-to-be and, in describing g him, Skye writes the exact same sentence twice. Further, the editing needs work, especially with the punctuation, which sounds silly, but is seriously annoying. In short, the writing style and characterization are trite and immature. This feels like something written by an unsophisticated, inexperienced high school sophomore. It got to the point where I just didn’t care what happened next and I stopped reading, something that I have never done before. Don’t waste your time with this drivel.

This book is terribly written and unless the last 25% of the book goes back to the “islands”, the plot is not set in a tropical location at all. It has virtually nothing to do with the Caribbean. The protagonist can’t possibly believe she doesn’t know everything there is to know about her husband of 1 week. She fumbles around with no regard for safety even though it is repeated over and over that her life may be in danger. The writing leaves much to be desired with often repeated phrases and inconsistencies, not to mention bad editing. I would not recommend this book and I won’t be reading any more in the series.

The book was free on Amazon. Sometime these are hidden gems: other times they would stay buried. This is the later. The author’s “strong female protagonist” spends more than a third of the book hiding in her bedroom wallowing in bed. Only in the last half of the book does she explore the ” mystery” which she solved in a few pages in her husband’s study. There is no suspense, no drama, no page-turning anticipation, not even interest or connection with the thin and superficial characters.

Also, this book employs so many of those very annoying mere mentionings to certain readers. This book does that too. The book could be set anywhere for all the culture of setting of Barbados impacted the story. The three Bible references were included to qualify as Christian literature. That the central character is a woman, no matter how weepy, apparently makes her a strong female protagonist.

Overall, a very weak, disappointing read. The book you keep reading because it just has to get better. It doesnt.

I can’t even begin to imagine that this author has written 16 books. I find it even MORE difficult to imagine that someone has published 16 of this author’s books.

To say that the writing is sophomoric is an insult to sophomores. High school sophomores.

Everything works for our protagonist when it’s convenient. She finds a total stranger by scanning a photo and using face-recognition software. She knows her husband’s passwords on both his home and business computers, but not on a drive she finds. Somehow when she’s logged on to a business computer as her husband and sends email, everyone knows the messages are from her.

It’s like no editor ever looked at this. When there are three sentences in a paragraph describing something Cindy is doing, it’s a bit awkward to start each sentence with “Cindy”.

This on top of a limited command of the language, like referring to “tasseled” hair or saying that “the high tide was coming in” (the tide was coming in, high tide doesn’t come in any more than low tide goes out), makes this whole book read like an 8th grade writing assignment.

I wouldn’t bother, even if you get it for free as I did.

This is the first book by this author that I have read and I was very excited to see that this was one book in a very lengthy series. My excitement did not last very long.

The plot was not bad but the heroine was not much of a heroine in my opinion. She is insecure, immature and takes total advantage of her sister. Then when her sister is hurt and the so-called heroine realizes her life is in danger, does she exercise any discretion whatsoever during her investigation? Nope, she blunders her way through, talking to people indiscriminately with no thought to anyone’s safety, including her own. It is only through sheer dumb luck that she survives. It is certainly not because of any competence or skill on her part.

I will not read any more books in the series because the heroine is not credible as an investigator or a heroine.

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