Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had high hopes for this book. The premise is quite interesting: a mother-bear-type lady FBI agent who hunts down pedophiles. It started out with a quick and readable pace, and kept me reading -- at first. But then, the errors and problems started to add up. A few minor inaccuracies in a novel can be easily overlooked, but these were glaring: for instance, a reptile expert refers to "poisonous" snakes. (They're "venomous," actually.) I noticed numerous other mistakes like this that some basic research would have prevented--not trying to nit-pick, but it was so bad that it took me out of the story, and that matters. Another big problem was the main character, Lucy. It seemed like every other paragraph hit the reader over the head with how Lucy was thinking about her daughter being vulnerable to the big bad world full of sick freaks who want to hurt her. Most of the character development and relationships committed the cardinal writing sin of telling, not showing. Not only that, but Lucy acted ridiculous and unprofessional every time the Internet was mentioned. For example, we're told that she doesn't use email because she associates it with the child pornography she deals with. (quote: "In her line of work the miracles of modern communication represented danger more than convenience.") Come ON. An FBI agent barely uses email?? That's completely unrealistic, and would not fly in the day-to-day business of a federal law enforcement agency. The greater part of her job is online stuff, and yet she can't seem to distinguish between the sordid corners of the cyberworld and perfectly mainstream social networking or online dating sites. Again it seemed like literally every paragraph was reminding us how pedophiles are lurking around every tree, corner, bus stop, and café. A little bit of subtlety would have gone a long way in raising the dramatic tension. Instead I was just rolling my eyes. In the end, "Snake Skin" was like a woman dressed to the nines at a backyard barbeque: it's trying too hard. There's some good material here, but it needed a lot of further editing and this read like an early draft. I wouldn't recommend it.