Paper Ghosts: A Novel of Suspense

Paper Ghosts started out with a creepy feel to it with our main character posing as a potential serial killer's daughter in order to find out if he killed her sister years before. The back and forth between the characters pulled me in and led me to think I had a riveting psychological thriller to sink my teeth into. Is Carl a serial killer? Does he really suffer from dementia or is he just a great actor hiding behind a facade? Did he kill this young woman's sister or is she on the wrong trail? All of these questions should've kept the suspense level high, but less than a hundred pages in, things become more about our main characters inner musings, and there are a lot of those. Considering the amount of time spent inside this woman's head, I was surprised that we don't learn her real name or what she does in her real life until the end. What I did learn was that she walked into a situation with a much too high opinion of herself and her ability to handle a man with dementia, let alone the possibility of him being a serial killer. We're told a lot about her "trainer" and how much time she's put in to learning to protect herself from Carl should she need to. The problem is that she really didn't know as much as she thought. I will admit that Carl does play some psychological games with our narrator, and those had the potential to be spine-tingling had our oh so prepared main character not been so completely unprepared for handling them. We do get answers to the many questions posed in this story, but too many were a bit too predictable and I never quite warmed up to the main character. I do prefer my mysteries and thrillers to be more edge of your seat, what's gonna happen next type stories and I didn't find that here, so quite possibly, this one just wasn't for me.