Deep Betrayal (review)

3/5 stars

Deep Betrayal (Goodreads | Amazon) picks up 30 days after Lies Beneath ends.  Lily is back in Minneapolis finishing high school and waiting.  In that time, aside from fleeing Lake Superior, nothing has happened and she hasn't seen Calder.

To be honest, I'm unsure how I feel about the plot of Deep Betrayal.  The plot felt slower than Lies Beneath.  It meandered this way, then that way, dropping red herrings to think you were finally getting somewhere (you weren't).  Then there were clues that went nowhere in this book (I am to assume that they'll mean something in the future. Otherwise I'll be very annoyed).

This book feels very transitional to me.  Like we needed to be somewhere by the end of it but how we got there wasn't necessarily essential.  Hence clumsily following around plot bunnies  until the end of the book.

In Lies Beneath what worked for me was an understanding that Calder was a predator. Often I feel like paranormals want to ignore the negative attributes otherworldly beings.  Lies Beneath didn't.  That seemed less prevalent in this book.  The relationship was a little too central and mushy for me in this one.  However I guess they've earned a little bit of mushiness. I'm just not much for romance.

So why does this get 3 stars?  Because Anne Greenwood Brown writes a book that is compulsively readable.  It's well-written and I just kept turning pages.  Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the plot, I rarely felt annoyed with the book.  I just kept reading and reading.  My favorite parts were Lily's mermaid experiments which added a nice dimension to the book.

For those who really care about Lily and Calder's relationship (Sorry I am not one of these people) you'll probably really enjoy this book.  For me, I hope this is just a typical sophomore slump because I still like the mythology of these books and still see potential.  But the story needs to go somewhere and this book doesn't go much of anywhere (until the very end).