Say It Again ... And Again ... And Again

Long Time Gone by Charlie Donlea

Goodreads Giveaway Win

Pages: 398 Genre: mystery

Rating: 1 Star

Sloan Hastings has just begun her fellowship in forensic pathology when she's given her assignment: studying the impact of genetic information contained on ancestry websites on real life crime solving. As part of her research, she submits her DNA to one of these cites, only to learn that she is the missing Baby Charlotte Margolis, the infant who went missing in 1995 and took the country by storm. The reveal of her identity connects her with Sheriff Eric Stamos, whose father died mysteriously as he was investigating the disappearance of her parents. Eric convinces her to help him look into the disappearance, which gives her a front row seat to all the shady secrets hidden by the Margolis family.

This book wasn't good. Had I not won it in a Goodreads giveaway, I probably would've stopped reading it. It was repetitive, too heavy on exposition, inconsistent, and far too coincidental to justify an almost 400 page book.

Nothing really happened in this book. There's a few key plot points, but most of the story consists of characters revealing or recapping information through expositional dialogue. And I'd like to emphasize the recapping. Every detail had to be explained to each character, meaning we would be reading the same thing at least three times. It was as if the author expected me to stop reading for a month between each crazily-short chapter. Did you forget that Sloan was revealed to be Baby Charlotte? Let's say it over and over and over and over and over again! And, what the heck, one more time for good measure. I'm not kidding: the book did this with every detail. At the beginning, Sloan (who is supposedly already a doctor, although she doesn't seem to know anything) learns about a case related to genealogy websites from her boss, then goes to talk to an expert who explains the exact same case again, without adding any details. I'm sorry, but this is the laziest way to tell your story. Find a way for secrets to be revealed or for characters to update each other without the constant exposition.

Oh, sorry, there was one other thing that helped the plot unfold: extreme coincidences. The whole setup of Sloan just happening to take the genealogy test is the best example: we had to go through a whole 50 pages or so to justify why she is learning this with details (her fellowship, the expert she talks to, etc) that never come up or matter again. It's just a lazy way to get us from point A to point B without being creative at all. And the whole book was like that: if we weren't moving forward because of random exposition, then we were moving forward because of some random coincidence that should've never happened.

I won't spoil it, but the ending relies on this plot device in about three different ways, and one of them is particularly egregious.

The mystery itself was also just not very engaging. I try not to spoil books in my reviews, so I'm not going to explain why, but trust me that it was very obvious what happened. There was not room left for theories: the suspect pool was small to nonexistent, and we weren't doing enough snooping to justify anything other than the most obvious answer. In fact, most of the time Sloan spends with her family over the course of the book is spent doing sweet family bonding. No stakes, no tense arguments, and no urgency. Just Sloan telling me she was stressed with the occasional conversation to tell me a new aspect of the story.

There were also a lot of weird inconsistencies. Sloan was born in 1995 and describes herself as an iPhone baby who has no idea how a film camera would work. I was born in 2001, iPhones didn't take off until I was in middle school, and while I wouldn't know how to develop film, I'm familiar with concepts such "a dark room" or "camera film."

This book just wasn't good. It was repetitive and a huge waste of time. I guess I can't say it was forgettable, though, since the author made sure that I was very familiar with the details of the case. If you want to read a book mystery, go find a book with an actual plot rather than 400 pages of the same things repeated over and over and over.