book review - Thief River Falls

I give Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman 3 stars, it should have been a book I loved. The promise of mystery, suspense and a twist ending got me excited to start it. I was interested, the main character Lisa Power is a writer and well known in her small town. A mysterious boy with no memory appears at her house.... I'm totally sold. Police are looking for him, but something is off, they seem hostile. She lies. She hides him and tries to find the truth. I'm still sold, although as I go on the waterfall of metaphors and the like are cascading off the page and getting in the way a bit. But I press on, I want to know what is going on!


Lisa keeps running around her home town trying to find allies and answers, but it seems that both are in short order. A few more things pop up that annoy me, I had to look back to see that the book was written by a man; it is- and it isn't anything big but there are a few times where it just screams off the page (Native Americans are referred to as Indians - something I wouldn't expect from the MC, and at one point he refers to getting an introvert o come out of their shell- sorry but no.) Lisa and her boy run all over town, blocked in and hunted. He remembers bits and pieces and she starts to figure his story out - it is eerily close to the plot of her famous book! What a coincidence!


Still, I'm on board, waiting for this ending that is promised to be amazing... I'm still trying here. We start getting bits from other character perspectives and things are starting to get hazy - I'm getting the idea that it isn't all Lisa thinks it is. I think I have a clue as to what is going to happen and I'm starting to get let down.


In the end I did not see the ‘twist’ coming, but I wouldn't register it as a twist personally. I'm sure lots of people were thrilled with it, but I found it almost as cliche as the ‘it was all a dream’ endings. The only thing that made me go ‘OK, alright’ were the two words that she mentions throughout. They are not the two words you think they are, but the reveal of that is too late to have enough impact. So it gets three stars, I finished it, it wasn't full of typos or anything. But I wouldn't pass it along to a friend.