Low Pressure by Sandra Brown
My rating: 
(2 / 5)
Bellamy is kind of freaked out by storms. And it’s no wonder, because when she was just 12 years old, her older sister was murdered horribly during a tornado that tore through a Memorial Day picnic her family was hosting. Years later, she’s written a novel about the experience that ripped through her family, trying to put the pieces together so she can put it all behind her. Why? Because something horrible happened to Bellamy too, that day.
This is a pretty serviceable murder mystery. It has a good plot, characters that seem likable, a tricky who-done-it, some perplexing red herrings, and it all winds up tied in a neat little bow at the end.
But by the end, I didn’t really care.
This book started out really strong. And I liked both Bellamy and Dent, the male lead – a former commercial pilot and also the former boyfriend of the dead sister. He’s interesting, sort of. And annoyed me, sort of.
“As a virginal preteen, and as a woman who’d taken lovers, she had daydreamed about kissing Denton Carter. While writing her book, specifically the sex scenes between him and Susan, it hadn’t been her sister he was kissing, caressing, and taking with adolescent fervor. It had been her. The fantasies had left her aroused, but irritated with herself. Surely her imagination embellished how good lovemaking with him would be.
But now she realized that her daydreams had actually been tepid. His kiss was delicious and darkly erotic. It delivered. It promised more. And the substance of what it promised made her wet, feverish, and needy.”
The sex scenes were hot! Often I skim over them because I either find them boring or uncomfortable. I’m not a prude, I just often think they aren’t well-written. Here, they are.
The writing itself is good, I just got tired of the characters going in circles as much as a funnel cloud does. I felt like there were so many lead-ups to a climax (and then no climax – in several ways, if you read the book you’ll know what I mean!). I fell asleep reading this several times when I got toward the end. Usually in a mystery I am kept up reading all night. Here, I wasn’t. I was just bored by the last chapters.
This came very close to being a DNF (did not finish).
I don’t think this was a bad book necessarily, just not a book for me. I couldn’t really connect with the characters after a while. They’re like those acquaintances you meet somewhere and think they’re cool, then arrange to hang out with them and are like WTF did I get myself into? That was Bellamy and Dent, and my initial liking of them petered out and then died altogether. I didn’t even really care when the killer was revealed – it wasn’t a huge surprised, I kind of thought it might be the person it was (mainly because no one else made sense). But it was such a “meh, whatever” reveal for me.
I wanted to like this much more than I did.