Closing Costs, By Bracken MacLeod ~ 2.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Mystery, Suspense

Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: July 20th, 2021

320 Pages

Synopsis: HAPPY HOUSE HUNTING…
 
Nelle and Evan Pereira were thrilled to close on their “forever home,” a spacious paradise nestled against a state forest in Massachusetts. Three months later, on a brisk Saturday morning, their peace is destroyed when an intruder captures Nelle home by herself. Quickly overpowered by the aggressive stranger, she’s forced down to the cold, musty basement where he ties her to a chair. The intruder has a singular, if unusual, demand: he wants her to make a phone call. One that Nelle isn’t confident she can make, even though her life depends on it.
 
Desperate to see herself and her husband to safety, Nelle doesn’t yet realize this was no chance encounter—it was a carefully planned attack. With no one to hear them scream, their secluded home feels horrifyingly isolated. And before this long day is through, Nelle and Evan, who share a dangerous secret, will bring a violent reckoning down upon all of them. (Goodreads)

After reading the premise for Closing Costs, I was so excited, especially as it’s set in Massachusetts, the state I lived in most of my life, but unfortunately this story didn’t work out for me. It began quite strongly, with Nelle being held captive during a home invasion, but soon after it rapidly went downhill for me. First, there was too much padding, which slowed the pace down to a crawl. Too many details about minor characters that I really didn’t care about, and trivial minutiae about house hunting and real estate which seemed to go on forever. There were multiple timelines which I found confusing at times and made the narrative disjointed. There’s a lot of repetitive violence, which if there was any purpose behind it I wouldn’t have had a problem, but this was just violence for the sake of violence. And finally, I never warmed up to any of the characters, not even Nelle or Evan. They were either stereotypical bad guys, or flat and one-dimensional. I confess by the halfway point I resorted to skimming some of the pages just so I could reach the end. Closing Costs wound up being a disappointment for me, but as always, if the premise peaks your interest, please try it out for yourself.

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