Nancy Boyarsky, The Swap

This book has a promising premise. An American couple, Nicole and Brad, swap houses with a couple from London for the summer, and unpleasantness ensues—Nicole is followed and threatened and soon swept up in an alarming bunch of illegal stuff while her marriage to Brad falls apart.

It sounds good, but it just didn't work for me. I didn't care about any of the characters or feel at all excited or interested in what Nicole was getting involved in. And, honestly, I kind of disliked her, in part because she kept ordering expensive food and then finding herself too upset to touch a bite of it. If you're too upset to eat, don't order $100 breakfasts, Nicole!

Plus the incident with the vase and the box (sure, order a really expensive vase just to get the packing box, you idiot). The story just wasn't plausible or interesting.

By the end, I didn't really care what the explanation for the whole mess was. I just wanted the book to be about a hundred pages shorter.