Moonlight on Butternut Lake by Mary McNear

Available from William Morrow Paperbacks April, 2015

Urgh. Slow, slow, slow. ‘Nuff said. (Other than the publisher gave me an ARC.)

OK, not enough said. Here are the issues.

The writing doesn’t have much vividness to it. That’s mostly about voice. This voice is fairly clean and simple, which in and of itself is fine. But it needs to be matched by something else…either characters that intrigue reader, or plot elements that captivate, or a combination of a little of each (or even a lot of each).

The author doesn’t really show much on either of these other fronts. Perhaps this is because this is the book out of a series, and a few have come before. But every book in a series needs to work as a stand-alone. While this does work as a standalone, it’s possible that the flaws in this novel appear because readers of the previous novels will have much more background coming to this one.

Since I can’t judge this as part of a series, I have to judge it as a standalone. And that produces a very low rating.

DNF: no star rating available.

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