Book Review ~ Five by Ursula Archer

Finished ~ Five by Ursula Archer
Completed 11/20
2 of 5 stars
336 pages


I received this book from NetGalley for my honest review.


Five is story that is more difficult to explain, so I'm going to let the GoodReads description tell you about it for me.

"A woman’s corpse is discovered in a meadow. A strange combination of letters and numbers has been tattooed on the soles of her feet. Detective inspector Beatrice Kaspary from the local murder squad quickly identifies the digits as map coordinates. These lead to a series of gruesome discoveries as she and her colleague Florin Wenninger embark on a bloody trail – a modern-day scavenger hunt using GPS navigation devices to locate hidden caches. The "owner" of these unofficial, unpublished geocaches is a highly calculating and elusive fiend who leaves his victims’ body-parts sealed in plastic bags, complete with riddles that culminate in a five-stage plot. Kaspary herself becomes an unwilling pawn in the perpetrator’s game of cat and mouse as she risks all to uncover the motives behind the murderer’s actions. Five is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted, but it delivers great suspense, unexpected plot twists, and multi-dimensional characters."


Ok, now that you know about the book, here's the deal ~ this book was SOOOOOOOO dull. It had a chance to be so good, and it just fell short on many levels. It took me forever (for me) to read this book (over 2 weeks) because I kept forcing myself to go back to it, but I could only take it at small chunks.

Let's start with the good ~

The Geocaching aspect was great. I've never seen that before, that with the riddles made for an interesting chase. It was really neat and it peaked my own curiosity in geocaching. Also really great was the end, the big reveal of WHY the killer was killing these people. That was all really neat and if I rated on the ending alone, it easily would have been 4 stars. The end was great, the geocaching parts were great, the riddles were great.

Now for the not so good ~

Everything else about this book STUNK. For me, when I read mystery, I want to be stumped. I want to read about the mystery, that's what the pull of the story is for me, and this book fell short with that. In this book, she spent just as much time, if not more, telling me about Beatrice's awful ex-husband and her bratty kids as she did the murder mystery. I DON'T care about Beatrice's personal life. It completely distracted from the actual story. There were these good moments of finding the geocaching spots, working on the clues and then these long drawn out times of her ex giving her a bad time, or her jealousy of her partner's relationship with his girlfriend. I'd read the parts with the mystery then as soon as the whining started, I'd put the book down and had to come back for it later.

If this book had been all about the mystery, and the chase, this book would have been a 4 star and could have even been a 5 star read. But it's about their personal lives just as much as the cases and they were not interesting good people. Bea is a mess, he ex a dick, her children are bratty and she's secret in love (or lust) with her partner and is jealous he has a girlfriend. The partner gives off mixed signals but seems to have some more redeeming qualities. The only character I half way liked was the officer that knew about geocaching and helped them out, he kept to himself and went about his business and just worked on the mystery. If that's how they all had been, this book would have been much better.

The mystery was great, the characters ruined the book for me. It's a shame, it could have been fantastic. As for the GoodReads description part ~ "Five is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted, but it delivers great suspense, unexpected plot twists, and multi-dimensional characters." ~ it fell short on every single point. Nope, not at all!!

Setting = B
Plot = A
Conflict = B
Characters = D-
Theme = A