Review: It Started That Night by Virna DePaul

It Started That Night (goodreads.com)

By: Virna DePaul (author website)

Paperback, 224 pages

Published April 17th 2012 by Harlequin

ISBN 13: 9780373277766

Source: Author for the Purpose of an honest review

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Stars- 3

Flames- 2

Lily Cantrell is devastated by her mothers death 15 years before and has never really gotten over it.  She also hasn’t gotten over local bad boy turned cop, John Tyler, who turned from her when she threw herself at him before he left town. (Coincidently that is the night her mother gets killed too.)  Now her mother’s killer is on death row facing his execution and John is sent to investigate whether her mother’s death is in any way connected to a recent string deaths of young women.

This is a pretty good book. I enjoyed getting to know each character but I felt that some things were glossed over.  I don’t want to give away spoilers but there are some issues in each family but most of the issues in John’s are just briefly mentioned.  He has some pretty heavy baggage and I felt like it should have been addressed more.  Lily’s family life is more fleshed out in the story but I believe that more of the book is fro her perspective (in third person) than John. 

           

There are also a lot of flashbacks.  Now I don’t mind a good flashback opposed to pages of inner dialogue but these were a little confusing at first. I don’t know if it’s the editing or not but generally when a chapter is going to be a flashback there is a day and year as the first line.  This book only had a day so when I was reading I didn’t realize I was reading a flashback. I had to go back once I realized so that I could start the chapter over knowing I was fifteen years in the past.  That said, I do think the flashbacks were used well for Lily (who suffers from episodic amnesia of the night her mother was killed) and showed her remembering things that happened the night her mother died. 

While I don’t think there were many great plot twists I will say that I did have the killer wrong.  The killer did blip on my radar but then I switched to another character.  I would have liked more at the end.  There are little pieces with secondary characters that were glossed over during the book that seemed to have a larger impact on the end that I thought could have used more info. Or the secondary characters could have their own book later that would explain their story because I have to say I am curious to see what will happen next.