It Takes One by Kate Kessler Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

No quotes because frankly, this book isn't worth quoting

They say there are no secrets in a small town...

Criminal psychologist Audrey Harte is returning home after seven years. She'll have to face the whispers and the rumors that have haunted her family since she left. Because when Audrey was thirteen, she and her best friend Maggie killed Maggie's abusive father. 

Her first night back in town ends in a fight with a drunken Maggie, with her old crush Jake to witness it all. Audrey can't believe it can get worse. 

Then Maggie turns up dead.

Now, Audrey has to find out who the murderer is - before everyone decides that she is to blame. And before the murderer can set their sights on her.

The second mystery I read this year and already, I'm disappointed. I'm also angry, which is not necessarily an unusual reaction for me to have when I hate a book, but in this case, I'm angry not because I wasted my time, but because of what happens in this book. Maybe I should go to whatever anger management therapy Audrey doesn't go to. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I guess the first sign that I wasn't going to totally love this book was the writing. It's rough, to say the least. You can tell Kessler is trying to write a hardboiled crime novel, which is cool with me, but she doesn't have enough talent for it. Or at least, not yet. The writing actually reminds me a lot of the way I used to write back in 8th grade. The characters tell us how we are supposed to feel other characters, making it seem obvious who we are supposed to hate and who we are supposed to love. Personally, that kind of writing grates on me (probably because it's something that I used to do), but it typically goes away with practice. It's repetitive, too, with the phrase "God knew..." as in "God knew she was used to that" used a lot, as well as bastard as in "useless bastard" or "bastard of a father". But still, I persevered on, hoping that maybe the characters and plot might save it.

I also realized, by the time I was 100 pages in, that I hated Audrey. Hated her. She is a bitch, but not an enjoyable one. It's clear that Kessler was way too taken with her. I mean, I get loving one of your characters, but it shouldn't be as obvious as this was goddamnit. She's a textbook Mary Sue, (look at me, using fancy terms like textbook, someone give me a psychology doctorate) with some anger issues and a tragic past thrown in so that the author can deny that she is one. Every single character that hates her is portrayed as being a small-minded bigot whereas every character that loves her is clearly better than the characters that hate her. Even the characters that hate her are just jealous because she's a pretty and successful forensic psychologist. And in case you didn't know that she was a forensic psychologist, she reminds you of that, oh, about 1000 times. It seems like she got her doctorate just to throw it in people's faces, not because of any real love for psychology. I also felt like she would be a horrible psychologist, because she can't separate her emotions from anything. She acts more like a goddamn teenager than any YA protagonist I've ever read.

Nothing in this book felt real to me. The characters and the setting were just hollow and negative stereotypes of a small town. You know, close minded, bigoted, etc. With the exception of Gideon, Kessler must have serious daddy issues, because all the fathers suck. And I swear to God, most of the mystery in this book was finding the mystery. Tons of backstory that I didn't care about, tons of Audrey and Jake action that I didn't care about, stuff like that that just bogged down the book and made it seem more like a contemporary book than an "unputdownable" thriller. Clearly, Kessler was inspired by Tana French and her slow-burning police procedurals, but she seemed to forget that French, while she does dip into the backstories of her detectives, never loses sight of the plot. The central mystery is still the central mystery. Also, her characters feel real people, unlike Kessler's characters. For a book that was billed as a crime novel, there is very little actual police investigation or forensic work or even criminal psychology, to the point where I couldn't believe Audrey is an actual criminal psychologist. That was disappointing enough, but then I got to the reveal of the killer. And I got angry.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

Okay, so it turns out that Bailey, Maggie's stepdaughter, is Maggie's murderer, and that Maggie was molesting her. I saw her being the murderer coming a mile away, but it's the way that the fucking criminal psychologist Audrey took this whole situation. She blamed Maggie's father, Clint, for driving her to molest Bailey, since Clint is the one who screwed up Maggie by raping her repeatedly. Basically, what she did wasn't her fault at all. No, fuck you, it is her fault. Yes, she was sexually abused, but she didn't have to turn on someone else. I firmly believe rapists or child molesters may be driven to it by something that happened to them, but they still need to have a bit of that "monster" for lack of a better term inside them. It is still their goddamn fault. Maggie does not deserve her forgiveness, and it's completely hypocritical to suggest that Maggie doesn't deserve to be killed whereas her father does when they both did the same exact thing. And what if Maggie's father was sexually abused by, say, his mother when he was a kid? Does that mean he also has an excuse? If Maggie was a guy, Audrey would have crucified him. A few years ago, I read the book Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, and in that book, the man who kidnapped Alice had been sexually abused by his mother. So, Audrey, is it his fault that he feels compelled to kidnap and rape young girls because of what happened to him? Or is he faultless and deserves forgiveness? Honestly surprised no one has brought this up yet when I read reviews of this book.

MAJOR SPOILER SECTION OVER

Oh come on, I'm being too harsh, aren't I? Focus on the positives! Well, I like the cover, since it reminds me of the album cover art for Glitterbug by The Wombats (one of my favorite bands). Glitterbug is cooler, but I don't hate the way it looks. There is also potential in the writing, but the author still needs a lot of work when it comes to setting and character development, though. The journals were a nice touch, too. I also like how all the titles and covers in the series match, that's fun right? And that's about it for the positives.

Up until the ending, I thought about continuing on with the series, since hopefully the writing may be better (though since the first two books came out in rapid succession of each other I doubt it) and the plot seemed a bit more of a crime novel plot than this one, I thought it might be better. And then I read the ending. Now, I really have to think hard about whether or not I want to continue on to Two Can Play. I might just stick with the Dublin Murder Squad for right now. You know what, maybe I just read this at the wrong time- too soon after Tana French's In the Woods (which was absolutely fantastic and well worthy of its Edgar Award, by the way) and tried to hold this book to that same standard. Who knows, maybe when the third book comes out in June I might forget that I hated this book and marathon both the second and third together. And maybe the moon will catch on fire. Who knows?

3 out of 10