The Woods Are Waiting - Katherine Greene - ★★

AUTHOR: Katherine Greene

NARRATOR: Angie Hickman

GENRE: Small-town mystery.

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A slowburn mystery set in the Appalachian region of Virginia. Great atmosphere, poorly-sketched characters, repetitive writing, below-average suspense, disappointing resolution.

Story Synopsis:

Blue Cliff is a town steeped in superstition, as residents believe that the local hickory woods are haunted. It is also infamous as the town where three children were found dead in the woods five years ago. Jasper Clinton was convicted for his crimes almost immediately, but now another child has gone missing.

Cheyenne Ashby left her hometown of Blue Cliff to escape its dark history and her superstitious mother. But with her mother’s health on the decline, their old family friend and police chief asks Cheyenne to return.

Her childhood friend Natalie is no longer on speaking terms with her. But when reality starts becoming more bizarre, Cheyenne and Natalie realise that they must team up to save the missing boy, even if it means confronting the being who lives in the woods.

The story comes to us in the first person perspectives of Cheyenne and Natalie.

Bookish Yays:

💐 Loved the use of the location. The hickory woods create a nice atmospheric setting, further enhanced by the small town culture.

💐 Enjoyed the way superstitions were used to amp up the tension.

💐 A gorgeous cover with a matching title. Loved the vibes generated by the cover pic.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌹 The character sketching of Cheyenne and Natalie. I liked how they were strong women who didn’t shy away from tough talk or tough decisions or even tough actions. It was a refreshing change to see such women at the helm of a contemporary mystery rather than the usual whiny protagonists we encounter. At the same time, there were certain things in their situation that were impossible to accept. Natalie’s blindness to her fiancé’s attitude towards her was too farfetched to believe. Then again, her pov is mostly useless and more focussed on her personal issues than on the central mystery. Her character development had a lot of wasted potential.

Bookish Nays:

🌵 Sloooooooooow. Nothing much happens until the second half. And even then, only a little happens. Basically, the book contains a whole load of talk and hardly any action.

🌵 The above-mentioned talk is also quite repetitive, with the same situations and comments being brought up again and again in the first half.

🌵 Several characters were infuriating, chief of whom being Natalie’s fiancé Hunter. Unlikeable characters aren’t a problem, but when they are unlikeable as well as unidimensional, it’s tough to enjoy the book.

🌵 Cheyenne and Natalie are both given first person voices, but there is nothing to distinguish them by as the writing in both perspectives sounds the same. It would have been better if Natalie had been written in third person to create a distinction between the two leads.

🌵 Several events in the plot feel quite flat and brushed aside without proper resolution. The reason for Cheyenne’s rushing away from Blue Cliff five years ago seems flimsy, and her return is almost instant without much stress. The resolution of her broken relationship with Natalie is also pretty conflict-free. The silence of some townspeople over certain key events is also unrealistic.

🌵 Even worse than the above half-baked portrayals is the lack of logic in the people and the plot. Kids have disappeared in threes for centuries and yet there is no deeper investigation by any higher authority? A suspect has been convicted for the latest triple murder five years back, and this relaxes everyone, without wondering how the earlier kids died? So many deaths of little ones, and people still willingly stay in this nondescript with their families carrying just cornhusk dolls and silver coins for protection? There seems to be not an iota of common sense in the townspeople.

🌵 The final 20% of the book comprises mostly of an extended infodump scene with the villain and some other characters. It killed the little enjoyment I had had until that point. I know cosy mysteries often end with an infodump full of reveals, but 20% is just too much. It didn’t help that the reveal was utterly disappointing and farfetched.

🌵 Guessing the villain’s identity is a cakewalk. Honestly, you don’t even need to be an avid mystery reader. If you pay careful attention to the character names, you will guess the identity of the culprit instantaneously. This is the biggest shortcoming of the book because no mystery should be so easy to resolve.

🌵 What was the point of the last sentence of the book? A cliffhanger just for the sake of it? To disprove everything that occurred till then?

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at almost 10 hrs, is narrated by Angie Hickman. Mixed feelings about the experience. While I appreciate her attempt at providing a different voice/accent for each character, some of the accents just got on my nerves. I couldn’t accept how characters from the same small town (and the same racial background) had such different accents from each other. Her voices were good, but the accents went overboard. On the pro side, the only reason I could distinguish between Cheyenne’s and Natalie’s first person povs is the distinct accent Hickman used for them, as they were written almost like a single character in different situations. As this is a slowburn story, the audiobook is still the better way of experiencing it if you want to give it a go.

All in all, I had high hopes from this one because of that interesting premise. But the poor pacing and the repetition were dampeners. Atmosphere alone can’t sustain a book. Moreover, a mystery novel is only as good as its ending, and the ending of this one is so tiresome that my rating, which was around 3 stars until the 80% mark, slid down by a whole star.

This is a debut work, and jointly written by two authors under a combined pen name. Their imagination is certainly in the right place, and more writing experience will hopefully help iron out plot holes as were present this one.

Well, whom do I recommend this book to? I don’t know. Maybe you will like it better if you have more patience with slow and action-free and somewhat predictable cosy mysteries set in a small town.

My thanks to NetGalley, Crooked Lane Books for the DRC, and Dreamscape Media for the ALC of “The Woods are Waiting”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.