Rating: WARTY!
Not to be confused with Stripped Bare by Emma Hart, or with Stripped Bare by Susan MacNichol, or with Stripped Bare by Penny Clark or with Stripped Bare by Lena Matthews, or with Stripped Bare by Rebecca Moon, or with Stripped Bare by Lacey Thorn, or with Stripped Bare by Lowri Turner, or with Stripped Bare by Aurora Rose Lynn, or with Stripped Bare by Nikka Michaels, or with Stripped Bare by Phil Martin (and so on!), this rather unoriginally titled novel was an advance review copy from Net Galley which I got by accident!
Not sure if I wanted to read this without looking at more detail, I tried to log into Net Galley not by clicking on the link in the email they'd sent me, but by logging-on separately and finding the title through an author search, yet this still got the book automatically added to my list! In the words of John Hurt's Olivander, "Yikes!" Having been saddled with it, I did give it the old college try, but it was not for me. There were too many writing issues and I could not stand the main character.
In what is obviously the opener for a series (I'm not a fan of series), this story is about Sheriff's wife Kate Fox who is guardian of her young, troubled relative, Carly. The novel gets into the action right from the off, which is always a good thing, when Carly’s grandfather, Eldon, is shot and killed, and Kate's philandering husband, Grand County Sheriff Ted Conner who is up for re-election, is seriously wounded. Kate's juvenile charge is missing.
It seemed likely from the start who the villain was, but I'm usually bad at guessing these things so I was surprised I was right. I had to go check since I did not read all of this novel, and the reason for this is that I took a disliking to Kate pretty much from the start. She's supposed to love her husband (she doesn't know right at the start that he's having an affair), yet she fails to get into the ambulance with him. This woman named Roxy who curiously happens to be present, goes with him instead? I couldn't get past that because it was so wrong and Kate was so stupid not to see what was happening here. We were told repeatedly how desperate she was to get to her husband and be with him, and then she lets the ambulance take off with Roxy, and she stays behind? It made zero sense, and no rational reason was offered for it.
There were other reasons not to like Kate. She lives with her husband on a cattle ranch, and at one point she processes this thought: "I could tolerate ears and tails frozen off, a common casualty of spring snowstorms..." This callousness on her part - that she could tolerate pain and suffering in the very animals she relies on for her living turned me right off her. I did not like her one bit after this and was rather hoping the villains would get her. I honestly don't care if cattle ranchers really do view their 'livestock' like that or not. It was unacceptable to me if you want me to like your character.
Kate was unlikable in many other ways. Her dangerous driving to get her to where her wounded husband lay resulted in her smacking into a fence post. I read, "The post didn’t break, but it tilted out, drawing barbed wire with it and snapping the line post six feet away." Her response? “Sorry, Elvis.” Is Elvis the owner of the property she's just criminally damaged? Nope. Elvis is what she named her aging pickup truck. Yes she was worried about her husband (the one she couldn't be bothered to get into the ambulance with), but now she's shown me twice how callous and selfish she is. Plus for a rancher, you'd think she'd know the difference between an AutoGate and a cattle guard (aka a vehicle pass, a Texas gate, or a stock gap). You can "sail over" a cattle guard. You cannot sail over an AutoGate unless your car flies. Shades of Harry Potter again!
When she finally takes Elvis to the hospital, she selfishly parks right under the awning at the entrance to the ER instead of finding a parking space! The hell with other people coming in! The hell with ambulances delivering other patients! Once again she proves herself selfish and thoughtless. At this point I couldn't stand her, and I was actively rooting for Ted and Roxy.
Some of the writing was weird. I read, "Because the railroad depot was the first building in Hodgekiss, in 1889, and the main reason for the settlement, the town had grown up along the tracks." How does this work? There was literally nothing there, but they built a railroad depot anyway, and then a town grew up? Where was the need for the depot if there was no one there to begin with? I'm sorry but that's not how these things work!
There were sections where there was far too much info-dumping, such as:
I started off on another trek to Broken Butte. I had to drive over most of Grand County and into Butte County, sliding just a mile or two through Choker County, which ran along Grand’s eastern edge and north to Nebraska’s border with South Dakota. We’re a bunch of square states, and Grand County copies that pattern. Sprawling over six thousand square miles, it’s bigger than Connecticut, Delaware, or Rhode Island, with about as many people living inside its borders as there are square miles.TMI!
At another point, Ted, who has literally just come out of a coma, is able to update Kate on where everyone is. How he managed that feat would have made a much more interesting story than the one I got! At around this point, I was unable to read any more of this story because it was turning me off on every page. I wish the author the best of luck in putting yet another detective series on the market, but I can't in good faith recommend this one based on what I read of it.
