The book was provided free in turn for an honest review.
Prayer for a Sinner was a troublesome read for me. While I don’t normally mind long passages of descriptions, this book would be benefited with a great deal more dialogue. Small encounters, like Charlie’s first report to the police, or even some of the sex scenes, I feel should have been written out as dialogue and action, rather than the author telling us what happened. It’s almost as if the author is afraid to leave anything to the reader’s imagination.
There is too much over-explanation of unimportant things (describing what a Blackberry is rather than just naming it), confusing usage of quotation marks to signify dialogue as well as designation of individuals and names of objects and a clear inability to paint a picture for the readers. The book is written from a “let me tell you everything” point of view, rather than using any writing tools to allow the reader to see the story unfold before them. The sparsity of dialogue in the book detracts from the story telling and makes it a much more difficult read. It seems that the author just sat down at the computer, started writing and published it without bothering to go back and read the book for errors or clarity, much less how to improve the prose.
If this is erotica, then I would have expected to be semi-aroused, but the clinical description and the repetitive usage of the same word to describe body parts, caused me to just skim the scenes because they were basically the same thing over and over. For the most part, it seemed to be gratuitous boring sex that could have been left out to make the story stronger.
At the end of the day, having read erotica before, this doesn’t reach the mark of the genre. The crime/detective story that is interwoven into the book lacks maturity and makes the reader struggle to understand what was important and what is superfluous. Additionally, the numerous errors in terms of formatting, chapter naming and overall book structure make this a chore of a read for anyone who knows good writing. The characters were minimally developed, in my opinion, but it could just be that it was done in the first book of the series, and the author expected that everyone would have read that prior to reading this.