Book Review - Murder Notes by Lisa Renee Jones • Ana's Attic Book Blog

Murder Notes by Lisa Renee Jones

Suspense/Mystery. Part 1.

*Early copy provided by the publisher for the purposes of a fair, unbiased review.

I love suspense, and I haven’t read it a lot in the past few years so I was excited when the opportunity to review Murder Notes by Lisa Renee Jones came up. I was in dire need of a change of pace, especially because the book I read before this took me 3 weeks to finish! PLUS, she was scheduled to come to Wicked Book Weekend, so I could kill 2 birds with one stone. (What a horrible expression! Why would I kill any birds?)

“Death simply becomes me. In fact, some might say I’m so fucked up that I do death better than I do life. And while death is attracted to me, my own is not appealing.”

Lilah Love is an FBI profiler, one of the best in the country, earning her the nickname of “Murder Girl”. Originally from a wealthy family in the Hamptons, she has been gone for two years with secrets, demons and regrets chasing her. She is investigating some related cases that are either an assassin or a serial killer, and one of her clues leads her back to her hometown, where she arrives just in time for another murder.

“This is where you belong, Lilah Love. You’ve been gone too long.”

I got into the story at first, but I never really liked Lilah that much, which held me back from loving the story the way I wanted to. I just wasn’t that invested. She left her lover, Kane Mendez, son of the crime lord, behind in the Hamptons when she left, but their feelings are still there, simmering at the surface. Though this wasn’t a romance book, the push and pull between Lilah and Kane was my favorite part.

“He is the devil, but then, I am no angel. He made sure of that. He touched my life forever, and I can never undo the way he changed me. And in some of those nightmares he talks about, I imagine what I would become if I ever tasted his version of temptation again. They were—are—the bloodiest of them all.”

The mystery of what happened to make Lilah leave is carried almost throughout the whole book, but luckily we do find out in this book, if we didn’t I would have been so mad!

We are introduced to a LOT of characters, and there is a lot to keep straight in this story. So much so that I started to lose interest. Not a lot actually HAPPENED. There was more internal thoughts and her investigation than anything else and knowing that nothing would be resolved until the next book in July made me really lose interest a bit towards the end, taking 10 days to read this book (I read my next book in a day, so it wasn’t my mood).

The story itself is very complex. It seems this killer is killing people because of Lilah and secrets she keeps. Despite my not loving the heroine, I still am dying to know how this will end, but I am not sure I will remember enough to care in July.

Likes:

A very complex, detailed story.
You can see her writing talent in every word.
The chemistry between her and Kane.
It’s nice to read more of a mystery than a romance for a change.

Dislikes:

I never fell for Lilah. She is a total alpha female. I liked her OK, but she was just a little too brash for me.
Knowing that it ended in a cliffy made me not really care to rush to see how it ends.
Waited a bit too long for the big reveal of the secret they harbor.

The Down & Dirty:

There is no doubt about it, Lisa Renee Jones is a great writer, on a different level than some of the books I have been reading. Lilah Love is a badass FBI profiler that just never fully grew on me, and I need to love the heroine to love the book. It’s an exciting, complex story that I am having trouble straightening out and figuring out what’s going on, but I think that’s intended. If the next book was coming out in a month, I’d grab it, but by July, when the next installment comes out, I’m not sure I will still care enough to pick up the next.