Title : The Good Girl
Author : Mary Kubica
Narrators : Lindy Nettleton, Johnny Heller, Tom Taylorson, Andi Arndt
Genre : Thriller
Publisher : Blackstone Audio
Listening Length : 10 hours 38 minutes
Rating : 1/5
Narrator Rating : 2/5
Mia Dennett is the daughter of influential Judge James Dennett. When she is kidnapped, the incident makes headlines, but only one of her parents, her mother, the stunningly beautiful Eve Dennett, is truly distraught. The high priority search has Detective Gabe Hoffman on the case. And with the media and the condescending Judge Dennett watching his every move, he has to get it right.
The book is narrated via 3 voices – Gabe’s, Eve’s, and the kidnapper’s. Each of their narratives is either a “before” or “after” – i.e.; before or after the kidnapping. So we hear the detective’s side of the story, his personal insecurities, the inter-office politics, the fact that Dennett is hobnobbing with Gabe’s boss, the condescending attitude that Dennett supposedly reeks of. We hear Eve’s tale, the cracks in the Dennett marriage, the fact that Judge Dennett is not quite the morally upstanding citizen, and that among his children he has favorites. And then we hear from Colin Thatcher, the poor commoner kidnapper with a hard life. Mia herself is painted only via these narratives.
“The Good Girl” has a pretty good star rating on Amazon, and in the beginning I bought into the hype, because this was going along at a nice pace. However the story soon begins to flag when the romantic angle kicks in. Kubica’s writing is clunky and verbose, but that isn’t enough to sink the book. What does do it is the fact that I don’t like any of the characters, even the kidnapped Mia; she appears to be the poor little rich girl who doth complain too much. And she has major daddy issues; she’s been waiting all her life “to find a man to take care of her”. The characters are thinly sketched, with shades of black or white, no grey in-between. Cliches abound. The romance angle is a tad disgusting.
I was bored with this book. I wanted to get to the end, so I fast-forwarded the audio. The Good Girl is a book which has not been fully thought through, and it shows. It has been compared to Gone Girl, but Gone Girl it definitely is not. I highly de-recommend “The Good Girl”.
This book had multiple narrators, but I didn’t like them too much except for Tom Taylorson, the narrator who did Colin Thatcher’s voice. Nettleton voiced Eve, and she made Eve sound weary, which kinda sounds reasonable. But Eve also sounded affected which didn’t endear her to me any.
