Review by mT_space_evolves -- Twisted Threads

[mT_space_evolves]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Twisted Threads" by Kaylin McFarren.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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I gave Twisted Threads(Threads #4), by Kaylin MacFarren 2 stars out of 4. I didn't laugh once while reading this book. No witty retorts, no sarcastic internal monologues, no silly reactions, or endearing goofiness graced the pages of this book. Before choosing it to read, I read the summaries of the first three books, which seemed centered around Rachel and Chase. Initially I didn't see any cross over in the characters names from those to Twisted Threads, so I felt it would be okay to read as a standalone.

Twisted Threads is about an assassin named Akira, hopefully working her last job aboard a cruise ship with another assassin, Hamada. They are supposed to figure out which passenger killed the sister of a character from book two and kill them. Akira and Hamada are told it's someone from the Lyon's family but Rachel's name is only mentioned a handful of times in the last quarter of the book.

As a standalone, I was only going to give it 1 star, but decided to do a deeper check to see if either Akira or Devon had been developed in an earlier book. I was finally able to figure out that Devon is Rachel's brother. Akira met them in book two and it sounds like she was a love interest to someone from book two who is now dead. Feeling that someone who had read the previous books would not find book four so lacking, I changed my rating to two stars instead of one.

95% of Twisted Threads takes place on a cruise ship and the book often reads like a parody of a travel brochure, with the highlight being a cruise with boring, condescending, oblivious people. The dialogue is so unimportant. Only a few sentences were written about each murder after it had happened and the body was found, yet there was almost a whole, unsexy chapter written about applying sunscreen. The dinners aboard the cruise ship got written about the most, and yet nothing intriguing or witty happened at them. Most of the bodies were found after dinner and yet there was no foreshadowing or build up during dinner, just annoyingly snobbish conversation.

I didn't believe in the characters feelings for each other, love or hate. By the end, I didn't believe that anyone took the murders seriously or had any personal stake in the victims or in justice. The book was had no sense of humor. The plot came off as aimlessly empty, and the romance failed so miserably at being cutely campy, it was embarrassing. The only handful of pages that had any passion to them were ones near the end, when Akira battles a character from book two, Even then, the character seemed to appear just so a fight scene could be written. They had only been mentioned in passing before, and ultimately had little to do with the mystery they Akira and Hamada were hired to solve or the murders that happened on the ship throughout. I will not be reading any other books in this series.

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Twisted Threads
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