I just finished a murder mystery

In a way, the author was honest with the reader.

The plot as of Chapter 5 is a disgraced female FBI agent, Emma, is sent to a small Southern village that has had a rash of disappearances including two murders. She is staying in Cabin 13 way out in the woods. Half an hour after she arrives, there’s a knock at the cabin door, and when she opens it, a man falls dead at her feet. He’s bleeding, so he probably didn’t have a heart attack.

The police take her into town to talk to her, and afterwards she goes out to drink at the local bar. The bartender, Jake, flirts with her and offers to drive her home. It becomes apparent that he makes a habit of driving a lot of people home. As he drives her home, there was a great big honking clue in their discussion:

“Feathered Nest has built up its own reputation recently.”

“Why?”

He hesitates, not seeming to want to go any further. “Because of the disappearances,” he tells me.

“What disappearances?” I ask, readying myself to absorb as much information as he’ll give me.

“I don’t want to talk about them tonight. You’re about to go into a cabin in just about the middle of nowhere completely by yourself. I don’t want to scare you.”

“But I want to know,” I insist.

He looks at me again, and a hint of a smile plays at his lips. “You sure are persistent. You know that?” he asks.

“I might have been told that a time or two,” I grin.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to get into it tonight before you go to bed. But if you’ll meet me for breakfast in the morning, I’ll tell you everything.”

Now, first off, she’s read the plot, so she knows she doesn’t need to check the house for serial killers, or even check that the doors are locked and the windows are closed before going to bed:

Unlocking the cabin door, I step inside and turn back to wave goodbye to him. He waves and starts backing out of the driveway as I shut the door and lock it.

What a day. Despite everything running through my brain, I can’t stay awake for one more minute. I try my best to put it all aside and collapse onto the bed.

Putting that aside, she’s pretending that she doesn’t know about the disappearances. If I were Jake, though, I’d be curious why she didn’t demand to know why the locals didn’t want to walk home before she entered “a cabin in just about the middle of nowhere completely by [herself]”. If I were Jake, I’d think she was either dangerously and foolishly naive, or else far better informed than she ought to be if she just happened to decide to rent a cabin for a vacation in a strange village.

Moreover, a man dropped dead on her doorstep half an hour after she arrived. Any normal person would be asking him what’s going on with this town. “Things like this don’t happen at home!” Again, her failure to respond to these events and to his vague warning words ought to tip him off that there’s something going on here, and his failure to react to her unnatural reaction should have told her that there was something squirrelly about him.

if Jake is so concerned about people that he drives them home so they don’t have to walk alone, why didn’t he offer to check the cabin for her? I therefore concluded just based on this passage in Chapter 5 that he himself is the killer. After all, maybe he offers someone a ride, and they accept, knowing he gives rides all the time. Only sometimes, they don’t arrive.

The protagonist, naturally, didn’t twig to this for twenty-eight chapters.

Look at these passages which appear on sequential pages:

In my opinion, it took far too long for [the local police] to make the connections between the disappearances. While most of the time, people don’t want to think of strings of events or occurrences having to do with one another, it’s important to find these links.

[W]ith these cases … there’s a distinct crime scene associated with almost all of them. In the last place these people were, police noted blood and signs of a struggle.

If ten people in a small town disappear and in almost every case, there’s blood and signs of a struggle, how can the police and the local population not immediately link the disappearances? If there were just two such cases, they should suspect the cases were linked, and as the numbers grow, they’d have to be the world’s most stupid NPCs not to pick up on the pattern.

Then there’s this passage where Jake said,

“Most people would have gotten out of town as fast as they could after finding a dead guy on their porch the first night they came. But you didn’t. Maybe I’m underestimating you.”

There’s flirtation in his voice, but for some reason, the words send a chill down my spine.

Yes, pay attention to that chill down your spine. She didn’t, of course.

In Chapter 6, when Emma moved into the cabin, she had trouble closing a drawer and found a thimble in the drawer that was getting in the way. In Chapter 23, Jake says,

“But people probably didn’t get my grandmother’s obsession with thimbles, either. Everyone has their own thing.”

So either he also has an obsession with thimbles and left one here while prowling around, or this is his grandmother’s house and he has neglected to mention this to the protagonist. It takes Emma until Chapter 31 to figure out that this is his grandmother’s house, and even then, she doesn’t remember the thimble.

In Chapter 12, the police are talking to Jake about vandalism and grave-robbing where his father’s body was dug up and taken away. He suddenly “realizes” they’ve found where the body is, and he storms out and goes to the place where they found it (a particular shed). He accuses the man there of having taken the body, but Emma realizes later that the man is far too infirm to have done it.

At no point does Emma ever wonder how Jake knew the body would be in that shed, even though she was standing right next to him when he “realized” the police had found it. The police chief even asked her how Jake knew where it was, given that the police was holding back that info to catch the person who put it there. She said something vague about maybe the officers had mentioned it, and the chief accepted that. Neither she nor the police chief considered that holding back the info had worked: Jake knew where it was because he put it there.

Also, Emma committed larceny by sneaking into a hotel and stealing the book of registration forms. She had to get a maintenance worker to let her in, so when the police came to investigate, they’d have had her description. That particular plot point just disappeared. There were no consequences to the theft; it was never mentioned again. I don’t even know what she did with the forms afterwards.

Finally, in Chapter 36, Emma asks,

“How could I not know?”

Her friend gives her a pep talk:

“He wasn’t going to let you see what was really happening. He’s been fooling people for years. Well before all this started. You know that. You can’t blame yourself for not immediately looking at him and knowing it was him. If it was that easy, none of us would have jobs.”

Yeah, well, I did figure it out twenty-eight chapters earlier just based on his unnatural reactions, so I spent the whole book mentally railing at Emma for being an idiot led around by her hormones.

And this isn’t enough, so my comments continue here.