Secrets to the Grave (Oak Knoll Series)

This is an enjoyable series and would recommend to anyone who enjoys a mystery/suspense novel mixed with an underlying love story in it. I love every book she has written. Has to be my favorite author.

Quite enjoyable and I have to say that the author gave away too many clues. I guessed the guilty person early in the story.
But I will continue to read more of these books because I'm attached to the characters. Love it.

After reading "Deeper Than The Dead", I was very much looking forward to the continued adventures of Anne, Vince, Mendez and the population of Oak Knoll. Sadly, "Secrets To The Grave" couldn't hold a candle to its prequel.

On the positive side, the book has a nice flow, some interesting prose and several interesting characters. If that sounds like faint praise, it is.

Oddly, this book fails where the last one succeeded: The characters feel contrived, lifeless and ineffective. Despite being a legendary profiler, Vince cannot figure out the killer or the killer's motive. In fact, he continually misjudges suspects, bumbling his way through a case that reaches its conclusion almost despite him. If Vince doubted his own abilities, haunted by the suspicion that his own condition may be deteriorating, then he might experience some character growth. Instead, he's relegated to puttering about Oak Knoll, following up on not very much at all and (safe one late discovery) contributing precious little.

But if Vince is merely clueless, poor Anne really gets put through the wringer, along with Haley, a four year old subjected to experiences so awful that they struck me as comical by the end of the book. The improbable, curiously contrived situations of peril felt extraneous and repetitive. Anne had much to learn but gave a lot of herself in the first book. Here, she's relegated to an overly idealistic human pincushion, making terrible decisions that put a four year old in lethal danger.

Extremely grating were the continued references to the serial killer of the first book. That killer was a much more formidable villain, a character worth returning to. I was hopeful that the numerous mentions of the upcoming trial meant that Secrets to the Grave would provide new, shocking information that would dovetail into the See No Evil Killer's trial-- but instead, after much exposition, nothing of any appreciable effect on the (still presumably upcoming) trial ever occurs.

One can only surmise that Hoag is taking the long view, planting seeds that will pay off somewhere along the series' plotted-out timeline. This book perhaps suffers from its awkward position in that timeline, leaving me restless and unsatisfied, but hopeful that the next book will begin to tie together the many interesting loose threads.

I love reading suspense novels and I am usually very good at figuring out who the bad guy is around the middle of the book, but with this one, I never saw it coming! Great all the way to the last page! I can't wait to read another one.