Don't Believe It - Charlie Donlea ------------------- 3.5 Stars

Been on a bit of a role lately reading these "modern" thriller books with typical plot twists near the ending. Don't Believe It can be added to the laundry list and is pretty similar to the rest of them. Not a super deep book with a lot of meaning on life. Rather, it's a pretty engaging page turner that is pretty hard to put down. Unfortunately, I found this one really struggled to nail the landing.

This one is a typical murder mystery type with an aggrieved girlfriend put in prison for the death of her fiancee. The book's main protagonist is a documentary filmmaker who's rise to fame is based on getting innocent people out of jail. So, she hears the story about this woman in prison and works to tell the world about her case. The story is told in parts as a typical fictional narrative while being interspersed with text from her real time "documentary" airing about this crime. As the story moves along, you get more details revealed throughout the book which helps you begin to piece together what happened. Of course, you get a typical twist ending, and the nice pretty bow of everything explained by the end.

As you can tell from my fairly annoyed commentary, I really didn't love the book. And, I actually found a couple parts in the past quarter of the story, particularly annoying. I won't go into the specifics of what they are and spoil parts of the book for you, but I found the author took some shortcuts to get to the ending and made some odd choices around character and plot. And while I understand it's a book of fiction, the book is based in reality yet a couple of things near the end seemed so unrealistic that I found I really didn't enjoy how it concluded.

Yet, even with those challenges, the book still earns 3.5 stars as I couldn't put it down when reading it. Even from the start, I found it an engaging read that had a great pace. The characters were pretty flat and, honestly, pretty dislikable across the board. Nonetheless, my rankings are based on level of engagement, and I found it a fun, albeit frustrating, novel.