This is what happens when the library in your new town won’t give you a library card because you don’t have any official mail with your new address on it, and you end up in a used bookstore with 15 minutes to spare before you have to be somewhere. You end up with a sad Lifetime movie of a book that you actually paid for, so you don’t even get the satisfaction of returning it to the library in disgust.
Sarah Spooner is milquetoast mother of two and a supposedly successful lawyer, although I don’t see how she even has the mental capacity to figure out how to open a briefcase. In the opening pages of the book, she finds out her son Nicholas, a student at nearby Cromwell University, has committed suicide. He’s the 11th to do so in this academic year. After a few pages of catatonic grief (you can tell she’s sad ‘cause she stops showering), she decides she must go to Cromwell and find out what happened to Nick, who had always seemed so strong and cheerful.
On the plane, she just happens to be sitting next to a handwriting expert who is on his way to Cromwell. He’s been hired to sort through college papers and look for students to red flag – the rash of suicides is bad for publicity. Except it’s homecoming week or something, and every single hotel room in town is full. So she ends up sharing a suite with the inquisitive Mr. Diamond, whose only nod to a character trait is his compulsion to overeat.
A massive coincidence and a kindly stranger are not enough for this groan-worthy story. Sarah also has to ignore EVERY SINGLE clue, follow every single red herring, get herself nearly killed, and forgive her cheating husband, who runs into the arms of his secretary (apparently not his first time) for comfort after his son’s death. She’s weak and stupid at every turn.
At one point, Sarah wakes up in her hotel room, after Mr. Diamond has suspiciously checked out without telling her. She collapsed on her bed for a suspicious nap attack, and can’t figure out why she’s so suspiciously groggy and out of it when she wakes up. And then she is not worried AT ALL to find the creepy hotel manager has been sitting watching her sleep the whole time. He suspiciously fetches her some suspicious tea, and sits back down to continue to watch her as she falls asleep again. She’s shocked – shocked! – when she later figures out she’d been drugged.
When the killer lures her into a small confined space for a so-called meeting with the president of the university, the guy she (wrongly) suspects of murdering students, and the local sheriff, she doesn’t catch on that the killer is the killer even as he’s poisoning her suspect. And then when the guy is dead on the floor and the killer continues to urge her to drink her iced tea, she keeps asking when the sheriff and the president are coming. They’re not coming, Sarah. You’ve been duped, and now you’re trapped, and you have to sit there and gasp while the villain spills his whole plan to you, “since you’ll be dead soon anyway.” Sigh.
It ends up with justice served, and as happy an ending as there can be with a dead son and a cheating husband. But by then I wanted to push the entire cast of characters off a belltower myself. As my father would say, these people are all too stupid to live.