Full Disclosure

My apologies for being a little late, but here's my review for Full Disclosure, the newest novel from Dee Henderson, releasing on October 2nd!  

After five years, I've finally gotten a book from one of my favorite authors. Thanks to the Early Reviewers group and Bethany House Publishers for providing me with my free advance reading copy.

This is an interesting review for me to write, because I'm a huge fan of Henderson's, and loved her O'Malley books. Not that I didn't really like Full Disclosure, but from a technical standpoint, it just wasn't quite as good as it could have been. I'll get to those in a minute, but let's talk about the things I liked, first.

The main characters. Ann was great. I loved how deep her character was and how unique her personality was compared to the others around her. I was even able to relate to her a little, since I'm an introvert myself. Ann rather takes this to the extreme, but I'll let you figure that out for yourself.

Paul was pretty well done, also. I liked his connections with his family, and the way he was with his co-workers. When all is said and done, he didn't feel terribly different and memorable to me, and reminded me quite a bit of Dave from The Negotiator. Not that there's anything wrong with that, he just didn't have anything about him that stuck out to me.

The second thing I liked was the story line in general. The romance flowed along at a nice pace. The cases were interesting, if not quite as suspenseful as some of Henderson's others. A lot of the characters from her other books make an appearance here, which is an interesting addition.

The third thing I like is (and this goes for all of Henderson's books that I've read so far) the story feels natural, the characters feel real, and it's not a captive to any one specific genre. Whenever someone would ask me what I was reading, I would say: "Well, it's a Christian suspense/mystery/romance." All those elements are in there, yes, but you can't have one without the other.

Let's talk about the thing I didn't like. And that is: details. Honestly, I think this book could be fifty to a hundred pages longer and be better for it. We're not told what some characters even look like, which made it hard to remember who is who at times. I get that there are a lot of minor characters in this book, but there can be minor characters that we at least remember. Rita and Sam, for instance, were in much of the book, but since I can't picture them in my mind or remember a certain scene where they made a serious impression, I'll probably forget them in a month. Maybe that's okay and maybe I'm just being picky, but it wasn't just the characters that were missing fine details. The story also had some small threads that could have been touched on later. There's one in particular that I have in mind when I say this that would have made me laugh, but for the sake of spoilers, I won't say any more.

Overall, I loved this book because it's by one of my favorite authors, but if asked my unbiased opinion, I would say that this book lacks the polish that it could have. It's a good book, but not quite an amazing one. I hope that it gets to be amazing before its release.