Title: Grist Mill Road
Author: Christopher J. Yates
Genre: thriller
I’m reading a really dense book right now and needed something a bit lighter. Not sure mystery/thriller books are technically lighter, but they are quick reads and I don’t have to focus as much on them. This one has been on my TBR for awhile, although I knew nothing about it. I have to say this one was just okay for me. The story was interesting, but the character motivations just made no sense.
From Goodreads: Twenty-six years ago Hannah had her eye shot out. Now she wants justice. But is she blind to the truth? (insert groan here…what a terrible joke)
Christopher J. Yates’s cult hit Black Chalk introduced that rare writerly talent: a literary writer who could write a plot with the intricacy of a brilliant mental puzzle, and with characters so absorbing that readers are immediately gripped. Yates’s new book does not disappoint. Grist Mill Road is a dark, twisted, and expertly plotted Rashomon-style tale. The year is 1982; the setting, an Edenic hamlet some ninety miles north of New York City. There, among the craggy rock cliffs and glacial ponds of timeworn mountains, three friends—Patrick, Matthew, and Hannah—are bound together by a terrible and seemingly senseless crime. Twenty-six years later, in New York City, living lives their younger selves never could have predicted, the three meet again—with even more devastating results.
The narrative is in both past and present, which was fine, but also from multiple perspectives, and this just didn’t work for me. Normally, I have no problem with multiple narrators, but this one just didn’t quite fit together. Maybe because the motivations for their actions were just really lame. The reason Hannah’s eye gets shot out….ridiculous. Equally ridiculous are Matthew and Patrick’s modern day motivations. I just was hoping for more with this one. Bummer.
Pleasant Nights 