Dark Waters by Gabriella Hewitt

TITLE: Dark Waters
AUTHOR: Gabriella Hewitt
PUBLISHER: Samhain Publishing
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 70k)
GENRE: Contemporary romantic suspense
COST: $5.50

Frankie Montalvo has inherited a rundown plantation on the island of Vieques, but running from no life in New York City finds her having to deal with the locals’ terror – the chupacabra. Everybody thinks her home is cursed, but she’d determined to make a go of it, enlisting the help of the only man who seems willing to help, Rico Lopez. Rico is a special agent on extended leave, on the island looking for a young female cousin who’s gone missing. He doesn’t expect getting embroiled in Frankie’s nightmares when it’s clear something is going on, nor does he expect to fall for her. But he does. On both counts.

When I was in the early chapters of this story, I got thrown back in time. To when I was ten years old and I would steal/borrow my grandmother’s gothic romances. You remember the ones I’m talking about. The one where the poor relative is about to marry into the family unwanted and someone is trying to kill her, or the girl inherits a haunted house that happens to be on a cliff, or…well, you get the idea. I remember being enthralled and terrified, which might explain my later-in-life proclivities for thrillers. This story felt like an updated version of one of those. But the comparison stops there. Because I never felt the same sense of involvement that I felt for any of those gothics.

While it has the earmarks of Samhain’s typically clean presentation, the author’s style is brief and choppy. Sentences are short, and while they might be descriptive, they lack any emotional resonance to draw me into the story early enough to make me care about either the characters or the suspense. The author’s insistence to try and complicate her plot by introducing a new character almost every chapter only had me guessing as to what long-lost relative would pop-up next. Not even halfway through the book, I was so bored that it took everything I had to even finish the story. And really not surprised with how it turned out.

It might have helped if I’d gotten to get emotionally involved in either of the leads’ lives. Rico’s characterization is better than Frankie’s for me, but that could be due to the fact that I thought Frankie bordered on dumb. The author tries to justify some of her less intelligent choices – literally, sometimes with sentences like this: Sometimes smart had to take a backseat. – but that didn’t make me like Frankie any more. It just made me roll my eyes. A lot of the scenes between the two leads didn't have a smooth flow, either. Scenes felt like they were all over the place emotionally, and I could never settle into a single emotion long enough to latch onto the story.

I think in the end, it’s the author’s voice that made the story fail for me. It’s simply not my taste. That’s not to say it won’t work for someone else, though. The idea of revisiting gothics in a modern setting is appealing. I just wish this story could have done that for me.

Readability	6/10 – Choppy style and poor pacing made it difficult to stick with
Hero	6/10 – Some attempts at depth, but the lack of personal detail made it hard to feel anything for him
Heroine	4/10 – One of those heroines who borders on too stupid to live for me to like
Entertainment value	3/10 – It’s been a long time since I was so bored by something that was supposed to be suspenseful
World building	6/10 – There’s a definite feel for the island life, but I never got a real sense of the fear that’s meant to be such an integral part of Casa Verde
TOTAL:	25/50