D.W. Ulsterman, The Writer

Adele Plank is a college student who writes for her school paper. She's managed to land an interview with her favorite author, Decklan Stone, who never wrote a second book after his bestselling Manitoba. He's a recluse who's been holed up in the San Juan Islands since his wife died 27 years earlier. Adele gets on the scene and goes about investigating her death and, well, the mystery is solved by the end of the book. The Writer started out with promise. The core idea of a mystery surrounding Stone's wife was compelling, but there were a lot of problems with the novel as well:

• The prologue, while gripping, had virtually nothing to do with the rest of the book.
• There were a bunch of long-ass sentences that seriously needed some trimming, including the first sentence of chapter one: "The water was especially calm during twenty-two-year-old Adele Plank's quarter-mile voyage from Deer Harbor to the private island of her interview subject for the college newspaper assignment she hoped might lead to her much-desired future as a journalist."
• There's also a fair amount of stilted dialogue, for example: "Sometimes we would talk of things great and small, while other times we said very little and simply enjoyed the moment to ourselves. If I was particularly quiet, Calista would tease me that the world would shake its head if it were to learn that someone who so many perceived to be a man of great words was in fact such a mute."
• Adele's whole story was hard to swallow. She dove into her investigation, doing dangerous and illegal things that it was hard to believe she'd do.
• Basically the entire resolution of the story was difficult to believe, and didn't seem to fit with the first part of the book. And in particular—SPOILER ALERT HERE—it's incredible that a woman kept in a dark, rat-infested, dirt-floored basement for 27 years would bounce back to health and sanity as quickly as she does in this book—or even at all.

So, an odd mix. The author's work shows a lot of promise, but I'd say this book isn't quite there yet.