Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Outdoors. Almost the entirety of the book takes place outdoors.
The good thing about Book Bingos and other reading challenges is that they encourage you to read stuff you wouldn’t otherwise read.
Take Wicked River. I won this book in a library bingo contest. I wouldn’t have read it otherwise…but I hate letting go of free books. It likely would have sat on my shelf for at least a year, maybe longer, had “Outdoors” not been an option in the Cannonball Read Bingo books. But since it is…here we go!
It’s basically what I expected…a contrived plot that continuously gets more contrived as it goes on just to stick two straw man characters on a horror show adventure in the woods. There’s a B-plot that’s wholly unnecessary and could have been scrapped in order to lengthen the 449-page length.
But I’ll say this for Jenny Milchman: she can write a thriller. Even if I could anticipate what was coming next, I was rarely bored. She’s definitely got talent and while she can’t elevate this beyond a predictable thriller, she at least makes it more interesting than most of what I encounter in the genre. There’s something to be said for that.
These books are not my thing but sometimes, it’s cool to just turn your brain off and read. Had I been more invested in the two main characters, it may have broached 4-star status. As it is, it’s a slightly-better-than-expected page ripper that fans of the genre may enjoy.