Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

 

I grabbed this because it seemed like a small-town mystery thing that might be interesting. Of that description, the only thing accurate is "small town." While there's a crime that happens, it barely registers for more than a hundred pages, as the people in the benighted small town go on about their small and mostly unexamined lives, chapters in different barely repeating POVs--just to maximize that scattershot feel. Most of the people in the town barely care about the missing (later dead) girl except as a stone they can grind their various axes on. It felt as though Ms. Kennedy had spent time in a town a lot like the one in the novel, and hated it, and this is her writing that hatred out: The people are all some combination of tiring, unlikeable, and despicable. There's nothing to care about in this novel, and nothing worth reading--the stolid thudding inert prose included.