Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In The Perfect Wife, Blake Pierce writes with the confidence and skill of a high school student in danger of flunking a class in basic composition and creativity. In The Stepford Wives part of the book, yuppie couple Kyle and Jessie move from their LA apartment to an upscale suburb down the California coast. Kyle convinced Jessie the move would be good for his business and a better place to raise the children they both wanted. Jessie was not quite as enthusiastic, especially when she saw that the wives in their new town were all complacent conformists. Everyone’s life centered around a sinister country club with strange initiation rites. In The Silence of the Lambs part, Jessie was training to be a forensic psychologist and her interviews with a brilliant serial killer led her to unlock her own dark past and confront her suffocating present. There are so many reasons not to read this book. First, the author’s manuscript was missing words in multiple places, showing a careless disregard for her work product and her readers. Second, she uses dialogue tags to excess, the sure sign of an amateur unable to convey what her characters are feeling or thinking without spelling it out — or of a writer with the ability but too lazy to write better. Third, The Stepford Wives part of her story was unbelievable, unoriginal, and unnecessary, except to extend the length of her book. The Silence of the Lambs part was uninspired and also unoriginal. Jessie and Crutchfield could not hold a candle to Clarice and Hannibal. And finally, a spoiler alert: Anyone who has ever seen a movie on the Lifetime channel will be able to identify the book’s villain without even finishing the first page.