Beginning on Jan. 1 of this year, I started two reading challenges.  One of those challenges involves reading books by authors I’ve never read before.  I decided to start there, diving into a promising paranormal mystery book.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to shelf it, possibly permanently.

What started out as an interesting premise and intriguing backstory soon devolved into an overwritten, confusing mess.  Half the time I can’t tell what the author is trying to say, and the tangents keep distracting from the main storyline.

I decided to give this book the ‘page 99’ treatment, just for kicks.  As it’s a Kindle book that doesn’t have page numbers, I looked up the number of pages in the print version (394) and figured out the approximate area where page 99 would fall (25% of the book or location 1365).  It passed.  The writing was just as clean and the story just as interesting as the first few pages were.  Guess the page 99 test isn’t all that useful after all.