Lee's Blog

I commented on clues that the supposedly competent FBI agent totally missed.

But, well, not all of them. Somebody broke the porch light at the cabin where Emma was staying and put the broken glass in the back seat of Emma’s rental car. No windows were broken in the car. So … is this undercover agent, who is investigating a serial killer, in the habit of leaving the car doors unlocked?

Probably not. If I thought she was competent, I’d say certainly not, but in this case, probably not. However, in one of the very first scenes, she adjusts the rear view mirror to check the back seat for anyone hiding there, and this action is so habitual that the friend she’s talking to on the phone comments on it. So, when she gets to the town with the serial killer, she stops doing that?

Okay …

My immediate reaction was, who had a key to the car? Well, who drove her car to the cabin when she for complicated romantic reasons left the car in town? Oh. Jake drove it, of course. Obviously Jake broke the light and put the glass in the car. But what was the point of that? She didn’t sit in the back seat. She only found the glass by chance when she put a to-go box in the back without looking around. It made no sense, but she hardly even wondered about it.

Speaking of the fact that Jake drove her car to the cabin, how did he leave? Did he have someone follow him and drive him home? Did he walk? How far was this cabin from the town, anyway? *Shrug*. I have no idea.

So now let’s get to the stuff that makes no sense at all.

There have been ten disappearances in this small town, and two of the victims have been found dead on the railroad tracks. One of the two is across the State line, making this an interstate killer. The local police have not called in the FBI. Am I supposed to believe that the FBI would sit on their hands for two years while the probable murders piled up, just because the local police didn’t send up the bat signal?

So the FBI decides to investigate by sending in one single undercover operative, whom they understandably don’t even consider competent, with nobody available to back her up within, apparently, several hours’ drive. Why didn’t they just descend on the town with a dozen agents and figure out what was going on whether the local police liked it or not?

One of the two people found on the tracks was a man who had been mutilated after death and before being left on the tracks. He’s mentioned a couple of times and never again, but we can figure he was used as spare parts in the macabre taxidermy we learn about towards the end. I’m not sure we even know his name or what connection he has to the town, and our hero doesn’t seem interested in the question anyway.

The other victim on the tracks is a woman, Cristela, and Emma spends her time figuring out that Cristela was the police chief’s lover. Also, Emma finds a dog collar chained to a tree on a hidden path near the railroad tracks, from which she deduces that Cristela was chained up there, got away, ran off in a panic, and got hit by a train. Emma goes so far as to get video footage from passing trains that shows brief motion where the path opens out to the tracks …

But, wait. How do you chain up a woman with a dog collar? She’d just take it off as soon as you were out of sight. So she must have been tied up to keep her hands off the dog collar, in which case the dog collar is basically irrelevant. And if she was that close to the tracks, she had to know there were trains going by. And trains aren’t exactly known for their stealth. While Cristela was wriggling out of the ropes or whatever, she had to be listening intently for Jake to come back, so she should have heard the train coming and shouldn’t have run out in front of it.

Why would a serial killer leave a woman tied up in the woods anyway? Any hunter could have stumbled across her. Depending on how far the cabin is from the town (which I don’t know, as noted above), kids playing in the woods could have found her. Or she could have not run in front of the train when she escaped, in which case he’d be promptly caught.

It makes no sense.

After Emma figures out that Cristela was the police chief’s lover, he tells her Jake was supposed to drive her over to meet with him the day she disappeared (do none of these people have their own cars?). And somehow the police chief didn’t suspect Jake, when he had only Jake’s word that she never showed up to be chauffeured to his august presence? And even then, when Emma learns that Jake was driving Cristela around at the time she disappeared, she still doesn’t suspect Jake?

So, having failed to notice Jake’s abnormal reaction to her abnormal reaction to learning about the disappearances, having failed to notice that Jake has to have put the broken glass in her car, having failed to notice that Jake knew where his father’s body was without being told, having failed to notice that Jake’s grandmother had a thing about thimbles and there was a thimble in the cabin … having failed to notice every clue, Emma fixes supper for Jake at his house. But Jake doesn’t show up, so she goes to look for him at his bar and finds the place slathered with blood.

I was wondering which of the regulars or staff Jake had killed this time. Being an idiot, Emma of course assumes it’s all Jake’s blood and that the police chief killed him and removed his body. There’s so much blood that if one person had lost that much, he’d be very dead. She thinks the police chief did it because he’s “an unethical, devious, lying, manipulative womanizer”. Good enough, but he has an alibi. He was with his latest girlfriend.

So Emma goes home and does the laundry. She pulls out her clothes and notices a tear on her trouser leg. She remembers catching it on something sharp under the seat of Jake’s car and also remembers that Cristela had a small wound on her leg that could have come from the same sharp thing.

Good so far, except that the police chief had just told her that Jake was driving Cristela around. That is not a clue. Cristela could have cut herself as innocently as Emma tore her trousers. Still, Emma considers that a clue because she’s an idiot, but at least she finally suspects Jake.

Emma then goes off alone, unarmed, to check out the serial killer’s parents’ house hidden even farther back in the woods. I’m actually not sure why she thought his parents’ house would be anywhere near his grandmother’s house, but anyway …

Emma goes into the house alone, unarmed, snoops around, and sees (and smells) dead bodies in the sub-basement. At this point, an intelligent and competent agent would get out of there, call, send emails and texts, and let the FBI know she’s identified the serial killer and found his victims. Since she isn’t an intelligent and competent agent, she enters the sub-basement and gets trapped. The door locks when it closes so you can open it from the outside but not the inside. Which is curious, actually.

Jake had made a taxidermy display of his victims posed by a Christmas tree, playing a game, and so on. Emma upset some of pieces from the game when Jake arrived and she tried to distract him so she could try to escape, and Jake put the pieces back in place as he monologued about his life. In other words, this is certainly not a prison where he’d leave captives to rampage through his displays as they tried to escape. So why does the door lock like that? Who knows?

And for the final (for now) bit that makes no sense. Remember the blood that was slathered all over the place? It wasn’t all his. It was blood from his victims that he’d frozen and later thawed to throw around the bar. He acknowledged that investigators would determine that it wasn’t all his. His plan was that he would have been kidnapped by the police chief and miraculously escape after being tortured just a wee bit, and then the police chief would be thought to be the serial killer and …

And what conceivable motive could the police chief have had to freeze the blood of his victims, thaw it out, and throw it around the bar in the course of kidnapping Jake? That is completely nonsensical. Yes, crazy people do crazy things, but it is evident to the police, the FBI, and the local citizens that the serial killer is crazy like a fox.

If the serial killer hadn’t been Jake, if he’d actually been the police chief and had wanted to grab Jake, he would have just grabbed him. He would have dropped by to chat, clocked him over the head when his back was turned because he was unsuspecting, and that would have been that. The blood-covered bar screamed staged.

Emma is supposed to be an undercover agent. Not that I’ve ever been an undercover agent, but I would think an undercover agent would be at least as attentive to people’s behavior and at least as suspicious as I am. If I noticed that Jake doesn’t behave as expected in Chapter 5, Emma should have noticed the same thing, and the whole book should have been her trying to figure out if Jake is the killer or if the police chief is.

So I have now spent far too long talking about this mess of a book, and I definitely will not read anything else in this series.

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.