Another murder mystery with plot holes and loose ends (Book 1)

I already went over the (*ugh*) romance. So here are some points that I particularly noticed.

The phone rang and she [his nurse] picked it up. “All the ladies want to work here to look at you.”

The caller must have found that comment interesting.

Mackenzie was the first student to walk through the door with a scowl on her face. She looked exactly how I imagined her: shiny blonde hair, bright blue doe-like eyes, and a cruel smile. She smiled when she walked in, which I found strange.

Wait, what? She walked in with a scowl and a cruel smile simultaneously?

Mackenzie Evans was the first student on my list—the only student, really.

A few pages later:

Ms. Claudia opened the door and walked her [Mackenzie] out of the room.

…

The door opened again. Ms. Claudia stepped into the room with a male student following close behind. She closed the door behind him. “This is James McGaven. He’s friends with Tiffany.”

So, uh, Ms. Claudia is out trolling for students for the police to interview without discussing this with the police?

Jamie had a permanent grin on her face that made both Isaac and I uneasy.

Jamie is Logan’s sister-in-law and Isaac is his brother. This grammatical error just sets my teeth on edge! No one would say, “Her grin made I uneasy”, and putting “both Isaac and” in front of “I” doesn’t make it any more correct!

And here, our intrepid hero, Riley, invades a crime scene:

Crime scene techs and officers moved around like flies, looking for somewhere to land. One tech moved past me and headed down the hall. I followed him.

…

“Who are you?” 

Silence rippled through the room. I barely noticed it. My eyes were fixed on the bodies. Why now? Why kill him now? Opportunity, or was it something else?

“Excuse me?”

My eyes darted up and stared at the man who stood in the doorway. Judging by his clothes, he was an Oceanway detective. He stared at me expectantly. I held up my badge and inched toward the door. “What is a Pine Brooke detective doing here?”

I shrugged. “I had some questions for Mr. Jameson. Went to his office, and he wasn’t there. So, we came here.”

“Well, you found him. Sorry, he can’t answer your questions.” He glanced at the bodies. “Now, I need you out of my crime scene, if you don’t mind.”

Oh, by the way, this double murder is never explained. Who killed this lawyer and his wife as they slept, and why? It seems related to Riley’s having contacted him about a client who was the brother of a missing girl, but who knows? Who cares?

At last, we come across A Clue. A girl disappeared for almost two weeks and was found dead in a condition that showed she’d been brutally tortured and raped over that period. Now we learn that Mr. Craster gave her a ride home on the last day that she was seen alive.

Mr. Craster neglected to mention this to anybody when she was reported dead. He says he dropped her off down the street so her parents wouldn’t see him, because she asked him to. Of course. But he’s a nice guy who helps everybody, and he says he saw a red car outside her house when he dropped her off. So there’s no need to look into nice Mr. Craster any further, even though he’s the last person to see her alive.

It seemed unusual that so far three girls had gone missing within the last year or so, and no one had picked up on it until now. But then again, we just figured it out ourselves.  We both had our assignments. I searched through our database and found three more missing girls going back as far as six years.

Yes, it does seem unusual. In a small town without a lot of crime, three girls go missing from a school in a year and are reported missing, three more disappear within the past six years, and a red car is noticed hanging around just before several of them disappear? With all this, the small town police don’t even notice there’s a pattern?

These are seriously incompetent cops.

Another body being found in the same spot as Jade could have meant a variety of things. It could have meant that Jade wasn’t the only person killed that night. Maybe she was taken with another person, and they were both taken to the hill to be killed. It could also mean that we might have a serial killer on our hands. It might seem like a large jump to reach that conclusion, but it was plausible.

If somebody snatched two people and killed them, isn’t that somebody by definition a serial killer? It doesn’t strike me as a large jump at all.

I should point out that when the investigators went to look around the place where Jade’s body was found, they saw beer cans and used condoms, and Riley said teens had always hung out there, even when she was a teen.

Riley finally twigged to Craster by a fluke: there was a hermit who had video cameras on his house that no one knew about. Which means Craster was hauling dead girls out there near the hermit’s house and figuring the guy would never look out the window. Putting that aside, the police should have already been suspicious of Craster, the last one to see Jade alive.

So they finally talk to his son, Boston, who freely discloses that Craster is a domestic abuser, that his wife (Boston’s mother, Lydia) vanished one night, and that while Craster doesn’t have a red car, his new wife does. That would be the new wife that no one ever sees and that Boston believes is a captive in the house. Boston didn’t see any need to make an anonymous call to the police about the new wife, of course.

Riley and her partner go out to talk to the new wife, Lydia, who gives them the address of Craster’s cabin and says she won’t call ahead to warn him they’re coming. She sure sounds like a captive, doesn’t she? They track Craster to his cabin and find him with a tied-up girl, and in the ensuing fight, they shoot him. Non-fatally, unfortunately. And then they find lots of pictures of his previous wife, pictures of her when she was dead.

Now I’ve got some logistics questions. Craster is a long-haul trucker. How does a long-haul trucker keep his wife captive for the days on end that he’s gone? She was perfectly happy to help the police by giving them the address of his cabin and not calling him to warn him they’re coming. So why didn’t she just leave or go to the police while he was gone?

We know how he kept the girls captive: he tied them up and left them, and if they died of thirst while he was gone, he just buried them in the back garden, and when that was full, he buried them on the hillside. The hillside near the hermit’s house. The hillside where the local teens partied and left beer cans and used condoms. Why didn’t any of those teens notice fresh shallow graves on their party hill?

And now, the mother of all plot holes:

Jade, the victim who was first found, got away because, after raping and torturing her for two weeks, Craster put her in the trunk of his car, drove her up near the hermit’s place, and opened the trunk. She then ran for her life and fell over a cliff in the darkness, breaking her neck and dying.

Now, I can see why Craster didn’t climb down the cliff in the dark to retrieve her body, but why did he bring her out there alive in the first place? Why not kill her in the peace and quiet of his home and take her body out there to bury? He had been so careful before, and had committed apparently dozens of murders across the country including more than a dozen in this small town, that it beggars belief that he’d just forget to kill this one.

And finally … did you catch that Boston’s mother and Craster’s second wife were both named Lydia? It appears the author didn’t.