Neonjade

Amazon blurb: “Ash Rashid is a former homicide detective who can’t stand the thought of handling another death investigation. In another year, he’ll be out of the department completely. That’s the plan, at least, until his niece’s body is found in the guest home of one of his city’s most wealthy citizens. The coroner calls it an overdose, but the case doesn’t add up. Against orders, Ash launches an investigation to find his niece’s murderer, but the longer he searches, the more entangled he becomes in a case that hits increasingly close to home. If he doesn’t solve it fast, his niece won’t be the only family member he has to bury.”

Genre: Mystery

My Rating: 6 out of 10

For a $0.99 ebook, The Abbey provides good entertainment value. However, I purposefully set aside consistency issues and hanging threads to make it through. If you are anal about these things, you may wish to save yourself some cursing and skip this read.

Consistency example: Ash is forever interjecting his thoughts about and practice of his Muslim religion, which wouldn’t be bad except for things like explaining to his ex-partner that he couldn’t eat at a diner that cooked their bacon on the same griddle as their pancakes, and later lecturing the investigative lead that Muslims didn’t eat pork, but he sure loved bacon! I guess Ash thought he needed to confess a foible for the lesson, and, to be fair, he may have been referring to the “turkey bacon” he mentions eating later – but that doesn’t really fit with the lesson of “people follow urges despite religion”. I guess he couldn’t exactly admit to being the closet drunk he was and keep his badge, but couldn’t he pick one that didn’t clash so loudly?

Open threads example: Let’s see, a certain question he asks of the main bad person is never answered. The answer impacts Ash directly and, not only does Ash not follow up, he doesn’t bother to ask for any tests to get the answer for himself… yeah, that bothered me.

On a positive note, while most of the characters are left hollow, you can’t help but sympathize with Ash, and the pacing of the story provides a nice tempo to march you through what I would consider a story on par with your average TV cop show episode. It kept me entertained for a few hours with only the occasional, “WTF?” Well worth the buck for the download.