thriller ( )

Fifteen years after the fact, someone finally confesses to the murder of Carson Tanners family. Now someone has confessed and he should be putting it behind him. But on the eve of the confession, Carson is seduced by a beautiful woman, Annette Baxter. At the same time he's being groomed by his mentor to become the next District Attorney, and handed a case that will make his career and guarantee him the top spot. Too bad the one woman that can help him is the one that seduced him. Beginning to feel like he's been set up, Carson starts digging into the case, only to find the dead bodies piling up in his wake. While Carson tries to get Annette to flip, she begins to feed him information about what happened to his family and he needs to decide if he can trust her or not. Is she playing him too??? Carson and Annette end up working together to figure out who is responsible only to find out it's the one person they least expected. ( )

Reviewed for queuemyreview.com; book release: August 08

I should confess from the start…I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories. So I was probably the wrong person to read and review “Faceless” by Debra Webb. Once I figured out how just how many ‘dirty’ police, politicians, doctors, lawyers, etc were involved, the story was far outside the bounds of believability for me and that pretty much put paid to my enjoyment of the rest of the novel.

There are a whole lot of moving pieces to this story. I had a difficult time keeping track of them all, especially when the actions of several parties are recounted just using ‘she’ or ‘he’, I’m guessing to heighten the suspense, but it just made it all the more confusing for me. The plot advancement felt very jerky/jumpy for me, first here and then there and then back over here again. The denouement pulled out some new and very surprising information, pretty much making it impossible for the reader to figure out the mystery.

The heroine is a criminal, but she’s the product of her environment and that’s supposed to make it all better. She’s an extortionist, accessory to murder, graft, embezzlement, and just about any other crime you can think of. She covers these crimes up for people and takes lots of money to do so. I didn’t particularly admire her.

The hero is a young and upcoming District Attorney who is supposedly very smart and a go-getter, but he never even had a whiff of suspicion that something was going on? Not too smart. He allows a total stranger to seduce him after a short meeting a bar. Not too smart. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him either.

I didn’t feel any real relationship building between the lead characters. I think the fact that the heroine felt ‘something’ for the first time during sex was supposed to be meaningful and lead to the assumption that she feels something for the hero? After a 10 minute discussion and a hotel sex encounter? I don’t think so.

I didn’t enjoy “Faceless” by Debra Webb. ( )