The Escape Artist began promisingly, with a gripping prologue and first chapter that piqued my curiosity. After the first third of the book, the rest of the tale was a slog through long spans of boredom interspersed with bursts of action and intrigue.

The potential for mystery and an engaging read was swiftly drowned by the repetitive cycle of the protagonist’s obsession with his dead daughter, his obsession with feeling like he owes the mysterious Nola Brown (who is not very mysterious at all, simply an angry, loose cannon with extreme artistic talent and a typically tragic childhood) because she once saved his dead daughter, and his obsession with his work, also, of course, influenced by his dead daughter. There are subtle, potent ways of portraying a parent’s longterm grief, but instead the author relied on bulks of page space dedicated to repeatedly informing me of the protagonist’s grief and preoccupation. I found it tedious, and it took away from the pace and excitement of the tale.

The writing style was not what I expected of a twenty year veteran of the craft. The writing was clunky, the characters portrayed as oddly juvenile, and the dialogue was used as an info dump. The matter of the mystery itself was intriguing, but it was drowned out and bogged down in laborious attention to the protagonist’s grief and Nola Brown’s childhood.

This book barely escaped being a “Did Not Finish,” and while it started off arrestingly, my interest waned to the point where I was skimming just to reach the end. The Escape Artist missed the mark for me.