Title: As the Wicked Watch
Author: Tamron Hall
Genre: thriller
Thank you, NetGalley for this book!
I really wanted to love this book. I’m a big fan of Tamron Hall’s and want good things for her. But, I found this book uneven to the point of frustration. I’m bummed! I loved the main character and the fact that Hall was able to put her own journalistic background into the story. This aspect definitely worked well. But the actual plot just fell apart over the course of the book.
From Goodreads: When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her a dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network.
Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on the scene—in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has thus far been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story—and giving voice to the voiceless.
From her time reporting in Texas, she’s sure she has covered the vilest of human behaviors, but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. You see, Jordan is that rare breed of journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom—often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of black females, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten.
All until Masey James—the story that Jordan just can’t shake, try as she might. A fifteen-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration that her job—with its required distance—often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her workload and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing black child would so rarely get. Three young boys are eventually charged with Masey’s murder, but Jordan remains unconvinced.
There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.
I liked the concept of the plot. A journalist takes a deep dive into a murder. Great. But this story had too many characters. Some of them could have been combined into one that had more purpose. I also felt like the pacing was off. If a book is going to be about a serial killer (not saying it is or not, but there are two deaths in the book) the second death shouldn’t be at 90% of the way through the book. The ending was completely rushed and jumped around a lot. I still think Hall is fantastic, but this book needed a good edit.
Pleasant Nights 