Review: Cemetery View by A.M. Caplan

                                                         

Print Length: 281 pages

Publisher: A.M. Caplan (May 19. 2023)

From Goodreads.com: When a shocking discovery unearths an old secret, can Stella expose a killer? Abandoned by her mother ten years earlier, Stella Ingman returns to her childhood home to help her father clean up after a flood. But she’s horrified when repairs to the backyard swimming pool reveal her missing parent’s hidden corpse.

Plunged into the depths of guilt and refusing to see her father as the number one suspect, Stella focuses on solving the gruesome crime. But hunting a murderer in the tight-knit small town could leave her exposed as the culprit starts sizing up more victims…

Can Stella piece together the clues before she ends up in a shallow grave?

  

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My Rating: 2 Stars out of 5

This book was an interesting one, I will give it that much, although I'm a little confused as to why the author bothered dedicating chapters to the point of view of a ghost (and had the ghost appear randomly almost like a side-character in other chapters) if nothing was going to come of it. Especially at the end, I was expecting the ghost of Stella's mother to appear, to help her in some way, but that never happened. 

The in between parts were decent, although it was easy for me to figure out who the bad guy was pretty early on, I wondered if Stella would ever figure it out. I also had to wonder why she didn't just put her foot down and tell one of the two men in her life that she wasn't interested. Instead, it made her seem as though she was leading both of them on, and really I also blame her father for this as well. Once he saw them together as adults instead of giving his grown daughter a vague "stay away from him" warning, he should have just told her the truth. Because knowing what I knew, some of these interactions were just stomach churning. And from the sound of it, no one had ever told the culprit the truth either, or maybe this book would have taken a much different turn.

And finally that ending. After everything that Stella had gone though, that was how she chose to handle things? Sure, she made it look like the person had left town on their own (much like that person had done her mother years before), but there was a clear case to be made for what happened and Stella had the injuries to back up her claims. There was absolutely no need for her to cover anything up, nor live with the guilt of what she did after the fact. 

All things considered, I would probably read more from this author just to see how they do with a different set of characters. And if you like your stories with some interesting twists, you may enjoy this one more than I did.