Momma Says to Read

I walked away with mixed feelings on this one. The bare bones of the story is absolutely brilliant. In the very beginning, Harry McNamara is attacked in his home. It's brutal, grisly, and chilling. His wife witnesses the whole thing, and her reactions during and after are suspect at best. We also know from the beginning that JP Carney committed the crime. The question is why. At this point, the story had me in its clutches. Unfortunately, it started to lose me rather soon after that. The story starts to move back and forth between the days following the attack and the backstories of the characters. Some of that back info is important to the plot and reasons for everything happening, and some is not. A lot is not. We do finally get to the why of it all, but the book takes the scenic route to get there. Granted, there were things in the past that the reader needs to know for it to all make sense, but I really did not need every detail of every time Julie doubted Harry or every time she looked the other way, nor did I need to know every job that JP had during the years leading up to the crime. Fair warning, be prepared not to like anyone in this one. By the time I trudged through the considerable history of Julie and Harry's marriage and JP's troubled life, I couldn't drum up much empathy for any of them, except for the real victim in this deadly game. In the end, I would give a solid five stars for the beginning and conclusion, but the middle was way too drawn out and had too much downtime for me. So, I ended up somewhere in the middle on The Confession.