Review: The Breakdown

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Cassandra takes a remote road home from a party one rainy night and sees a car broken down along the road. She doesn't stop for long and continues on her way, only to find out the next morning that the woman was murdered. Her mental state slowly unravels and it appears she's inherited her mother's early onset dementia. Or has she...

I keep seeing BA Paris everywhere so I snapped this up when it went on sale for ninety-nine cents. I wouldn't mind having my dollar back.

I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. A woman may or may not be going off the deep end. That's pretty much it. The murder that happened close by pretty much fades into the background until the very end.

Tedious is the best word to describe this book. I found it incredibly tedious. It was a short read but the hours I spent reading it felt more like a week. I found Cassie more annoying than sympathetic and since the book only had three prominent characters, Cassie included, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on fairly early in the proceedings. After that, I was waiting for Cassie to catch up.

The wrap up came out of left field. It was at that point I interrupted my wife's Harry Potter reading to run down the story.

She said "Is that a short story?"
I said "No, it's a whole goddamn book."

That's the point I've been driving toward. I don't the setup had the juice to go novel length. It was engaging enough to finish but I have no fond memories of the time we spent together. Two out of five stars.

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