Rating: WARTY!
I was quickly done with this sad little thing. Iris Johansen was 76 when she wrote this in 2014 and I'm thinking she's either out of touch or perhaps becoming too long in the tooth to be writing stories of this nature. No one should write a story like this one. 2014 was three years before #MeToo became a viral movement, but she seems to have learned nothing from similar issues and movements, and consequently this book champions a codependent relationship in which no apparently means yes, in a minute.
The main character is abused from the outset when another controlling guy forces her out of her visit to her son in Hong Kong, and into an investigation of a dangerous killer because she happens to be in the right part of the world and there is a single policing agency anywhere near which can take care of it! Yeah! Right!
The writing is stilted and predictable and the story hopped around annoyingly without showing any interest in going anywhere interesting. I skimmed and skipped in the faint hope that it might improve, but it never did, which honestly didn't surprise me, and I dropped it. I can't commend it because of the appallingly poor writing to say nothing of the clueless relationships depicted here. I'm done with this author.
