millinocket's Full Review: Theresa Schwegel - Last Known Address
I do love a good mystery. Lots of blood along with it is always nice, but certainly not fundamental to my enjoyment. A well plotted crime procedural can knock my socks off. Sometimes, though, things just plain miss the mark, and that's what happens in Last Known Address. Penned by Edgar Award winner Theresa Schwegel, the novel begins with promise, but quickly spirals as the number of miscalculations mounts.
Sloan Pearson is a detective. She seems to be the only woman in her unit and is constantly harassed by the men who surround her like a swarm of gnats. When she catches a case involving what looks like a serial rapist, it's all she can do to cut through the red tape and misogyny to simply do the basics of her job. Her personal life is complicated by her deteriorating relationship with a detective from another unit and he father's sudden illness. Last Known Address chronicles Sloan's attempts to work the case, work the interoffice politics and deal with her personal problems all at once.
One interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of some abrupt perspective switches. Most of the story is told in third person from Sloan's perspective, but an occasional short chapter is told in the first person from the perspective of one of the victims, sometimes during the crime itself. These narrators are not named within their segments and the switch in focus makes the crimes personal, frightening and real. It's a nice touch that would have been even nicer had the victims been more stylistically differentiated from the main narrative. I didn't get much of a sense of individuality from these chapters and ended up confusing the women. Part of the blame also lies with the rest of the story, which is too vague in its details to give these bits a proper place within the greater plotline.
Thus we come to the biggest downfall of Last Known Address, a problem that leads directly to the vague and in places unacceptably scanty main narrative. The crux of the issue is that Sloan is clinically depressed. Now, I have nothing against clinical depression, as an entity, a character trait or a topic. But Sloan's depression is never named, it just oozes a morbid funk across the entire book. She is never happy, her life sucks, everyone she works with (or interacts with) - bar none - is a complete jerk who goes out of his or her way to make Sloan miserable when the truth is that Sloan is just plain miserable. Making her coworkers, father and boyfriend all into caricatures of scummy, neglectful mouth-breathing Neanderthals just underscores poor Sloan's plight in life - you know, being the only decent person in the world. I grew to actively dislike Sloan mainly because I was sick of listening to her bemoan her many misfortunes, most of which are, once again, sketchily drawn in favor of spending time with her inner misery. I don't even think she's supposed to come across as depressed and miserable within herself - we're just supposed to get on the train and believe that she lives in a world that offers her nothing but bitter misfortune.
The sketchy peripheral characters look quite a bit like introductions in many cases. As if this were the beginning of a series and we are getting an initial taste of the co-workers, Sloan's father and his girlfriend and Sloan's current boyfriend (who really gets the shaft as far as characterization and demonization). If that is the case, it's unfortunate, because neither Sloan nor her world is compelling enough based on this book to make me want to pick up another featuring the same dull misery. The story is plodding and painfully obvious in its twists and far too much time is spent on Sloan herself. A slow paced police procedural is a tough sell and I'm not biting on this one.
Overall I was disappointed with Last Known Address. The story is dull and plodding and Sloan as a main character is depressed and depressing. The plot details are conventional and predictable and the peripheral characters are so sketchily drawn as to make them difficult to differentiate. The one bright spot is the initial perspective switches that give the crimes an immediacy that draws us in for a minute to the fear of the victims. Unfortunately even that gets lost as they too begin to lose focus and meld together into the morass of misery that is the world of Sloan Pearson. I don't like her, I don't like her world and I'm in no way eager to spend any more time with either. I don't recommend this one for even the most hardcore detective novel fans.
Many thanks to the Books Category Leads for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
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