A chill rain in January Book

2.4/5

This is an odd one. It's fairly well written most of the time (although sometimes it interrupts conversation scenes with long paragraphs of exposition about a character's background), but it's weirdly structured, told mostly in the POVs of three characters: Zoe Strachan, a middle-aged, seductive psychopath; Ramona Orlitzki, a 75-year-old woman; and Karl Alberg, staff sergeant in the Sunshine Coast division of the RCMP, and apparently the protagonist of this series, yet the least interesting aspect of the whole thing.

It's been a long time since I read a book where the protagonist was almost entirely inconsequential to the main plot of his own novel, but there you are. Alberg is bland and typical, and he serves almost no purpose. It's almost as if Wright struggles sometimes to keep his role in the whole thing relevant, because the conflict that sparks this chain of events didn't need him to get the ball rolling and was hardly affected by him once he got involved.

The most interesting chapters involved Ramona, who escapes her old folks' home and eludes the entire town in her little adventure; and Zoe, the one who did it, whom we see commit murder early on, whom the novel is primarily focused on. She steals the show here. She's cold, detached, and we can feel it. Wright conveys that aspect well. My fingers got a little stiff from how cold she was.

But Zoe's all the novel really has going for it. Everything that occurs in Chill Rain occurs because the story would drag for far too long if it didn't. It occurs for the sake of coincidental convenience. One character just happens to be there, or there, or THERE, even if it doesn't make much logical sense. There's barely a case here. The story is hardly interesting and filled with characters who don't do much, and it is riddled with seemingly endless shortcuts.

Oh, well...