HardcoverCassandra is a dowser -- walking land with a forked stick divining for the landowners where water might be hiding. While she's working a job in an empty valley alone, she comes across the hanging body of a teen girl. If only it'd still been hanging there when Cass returned to the spot later with the police...
Such a strong beginning! I was immediately drawn in, wondering if it'd been an apparition or if the killer, hiding nearby, had cut the girl down to hide her. Problem is, I seemed more interested in the girl than the author was. He got off on tangents and packed Cassandra's life far too full with "stuff": dead teenage brother, father succumbing to Alzheimer's, religious mom who looks down on the family divining, twin 11-year-old sons who call their mother "Cass" -- oh brother -- speak like pretentious college students and who were conceived during the first of a two-night stand with a married man, a platonic affair with her former fiance and currently married town sheriff who also happens to be her twins' godfather, and (I'm getting so completely bored of this serious issue being trotted out with such regularity) a childhood rape.
It just needed to be tightened up and the heroine given a bit more backbone. Also, the author should've spent at least an afternoon with pre-teen boys so that his attempts at their lines of dialogue might've resembled something that occurs in nature.
C-
