#saltwater graves

Publication Date: December 14th, 2020

Rating:  ★★★

My heart breaks over and over for Detective Casey White.

A woman’s body washes up on the beach with striking similarities to a case from a couple years back involving the ex-sheriff, Jericho Flynn, Casey’s romantic partner. Days later another woman is found, and both of them have ties to Jericho’s past. Every clue uncovered seems to incriminate her loving partner more and more, and time is running out to catch this killer before he catches her.

Saltwater Graves was a good story, it would make a good episode of a crime drama to use as background noise when I’m doing other things, but it wasn’t an edge-of-my-seat/can’t-put-it-down thriller. The procedural aspect of this book was fun to read and was just like watching CSI or Bones as they try to find out what happened to the victims. The book doesn’t really get into its crescendo until the third or fourth quarter of the book, until then I wasn’t crazy about it. I did find myself so sad and heartbroken for Casey toward the end of the book as she faced one loss after another in rapid succession and couldn’t catch a break. I also found the ending to be unsatisfactory, I’m sure there will of course be another installment in the Detective Casey White series, but this ending wasn’t one urging me to read on. I do applaud the author’s ability to break my heart for Casey.

I was mostly excited for this book because of the fact that the setting, the Outer Banks, is where I live and grew up. For me, I feel like it was a mistake on my part because this wasn’t an Outer Banks setting this was more like a Virginia Beach setting through and through and the inaccuracies drove me up a wall, but that’s just a personal grievance of mine and did not affect the rating I gave this book.

Thank you to NetGalley, B.R. Spangler, and Bookouture for the ARC of this book.

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Saylor Rains

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