Review: His Perfect Crime (Emily Slate #1) by Alex Sigmore

                                                       

Print Length: 260 pages

Publisher: Eric Warren Author, LLC (June 8, 2022)

From Goodreads.com: A strange box is unearthed deep in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains. What’s discovered inside will rock a small town to its core.

FBI Special Agent Emily Slate is no stranger to tragedy. After losing her husband three months ago, then botching the biggest case of her career, she’s barely hanging on to the only job she’s ever wanted. But a new case in the mountains of northern Virginia might just be her one chance to redeem herself.

Emily arrives in the town of Stillwater to find the body of a woman with her eyes sewn shut, crammed inside a box half the size of a casket. The only problem is, no one knows who this woman is, and no one has reported her missing.

As Emily begins to unravel the layers of this complex case, it becomes clear the woman’s savage murder wasn’t unique. She’ll have to risk everything if she wants to get to the bottom of the mystery, and stop the killer from claiming their next victim.

But what she doesn’t know is that an even more sinister secret lurks at the root of these murders. One which puts Emily herself in the crosshairs.

This could be Emily’s finest moment, or her last.

  

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

For the first novel in a new series, I felt that this one was lacking in a few areas. To begin with Emily comes across as having a huge chip on her shoulder. We are told this is due to tragic events in her past, but it takes a good portion of the book to even find out what those events were. I felt like due to not being able to understand her made me not able to connect with her, and kept me from fully comprehending the reason she acted the way that she did. 

I liked Liam a little better, he was a solid detective (although I did have some issues with the way he went behind Emily's back to the chief of police after she specifically asked him to wait until they had conformation on her hunch). And while I enjoyed how well he and Emily worked together, I could have done with the constant hints that they were attracted to one another, or felt a spark, and all of the other things the author had to say about them. I am curious as this is now a fourteen book series, whether or not he makes an appearance in the later books (and whether or not he follows through with his plans that he reveals at the end of the book). 

Now that I've talked about the two main characters, let me get into the plot of this story. I very much enjoyed the fact that it written in such a way that everything was out in the open, and I didn't have to try and guess at what the characters meant. It also meant that I was able to get through this one quickly (less than two days as a matter of fact). I also admit, that I was surprised at who the killer turned out to be as I fully expected it to be someone else due to their despicable actions.  

That being said, there were some glaring plot holes in this one. Some were explained away as simply being due to the fact that the chief of police was as corrupt as they come and didn't do a very thorough investigation the first time around (which honestly didn't make any sense whatsoever either when he could have just investigated other possible suspects leaving out the one line of questioning). 

Despite this, I noticed that this entire series is available on Kindle Unlimited, so I have already borrowed book number two, and will wait to base whether or not I will continue on past that after I have read it.