Mike Nappa: Annabel Lee

By Kelly Bridgewater

Description from Amazon:

Fourteen miles east of Peachtree, Alabama, a secret is hidden. That secret's name is Annabel Lee Truckson, and even she doesn't know why her mysterious uncle has stowed her deep underground in a military-style bunker. He's left her with a few German words, a barely-controlled guard dog, and a single command: "Don't open that door for anybody, you got it? Not even me."

Above ground, a former Army sniper called The Mute and an enigmatic "Dr. Smith" know about the girl. As the race begins to find her, the tension builds. Who wants to set her free? Why does the other want to keep her captive forever? Who will reach her first?

Private investigators Trudi Coffey and Samuel Hill need to piece together the clues and stay alive long enough to retrieve the girl--before it's too late.

From Amazon

My Thoughts:

I really love a great suspense or thriller book that has lots of action and non-stop heart thumping trouble for the characters. I believe every good suspense or thriller book will carry an interesting plot with characters on the run from something bad, whether psychological, physical, or spiritual. I want to be running away with the characters as they run for their life or try to solve the mystery. Mike Nappa’s book Annabel Lee really did not do this for me.

The plot was boring and did not keep my attention at all. I couldn’t wait for the book to be over. The story is told from about four different characters perspectives. At the beginning of the book, I was confused as to what was even going on. Why was Annabel being forced into a room underground? Why was her caretaker dead? Would anyone even find her? Those questions were meant to be answered, but it takes 300 pages for Nappa to even allow me to understand why she was down in the tunnel with this horrible dog. Why couldn’t Nappa show me, maybe through the journal that Annabel finds, the reasoning she was down there?

The characters were not truly developed either. I didn’t care what happened to any of them. They appeared to be stick figures running through the pages of the story. They really had no personality. Trudi and Samuel were divorced because of issues in their marriage, but they weren’t flushed out as characters either. Mute, rightly named, wanted to solve what happened to the girl, but he had a hard time solving the case when he couldn’t talk.

Nappa’s writing is his greatest strength. He knows how to show a story through the right amount of dialogue and prose and have the characters actually speak or think in a way that is appropriate for them. Nappa does a good job at allowing me to completely see the setting in my imagination.

Not really suspenseful enough, Mike Nappa’s Annabel Lee has a lackluster plot, which I wouldn’t even put in the suspense genre and characters with any distinguishing personalities. I wouldn’t recommend fans of suspense pick this book up.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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