As Good As Dead

Well.... that took a hard left. I'm gonna need physiotherapy after the whiplash I just got. Super disappointed with the finale.

***Spoilers: First of all, the complete character shift was super jarring. The author tried to build it up so that it felt plausible but in the end it was just too hard a shift to work, in my opinion. (Losing faith in cops etc) It doesn't matter that he was a serial killer, and it doesn't matter that she was struggling with PTSD, it was just too incongruous with everything she was shown to be previously. Plus, having PTSD and trauma does not suddenly make you more prone to violence. That was just a cop-out. I feel like there were better, more clever ways she could have dealt with getting back at Max and that would have fit the characters better. And Andie's dad was a serial killer? Really? Pip went through every inch of Andie's life to trying to find her killer and never once got a whiff of a legit serial killer in the house?
I wanted to love this so much. The first half of the book was SO good! I loved the eerie mystery of being stalked and the stick figures and the printer and music going off. Spooked me. But then it all just went downhill. The extremes that they went through to clear the DNA and create alibis felt ridiculous. And the amount of work that went into it, the planning, the alibis, the breaking into Max' house... they managed to figure it all out in one night? Getting her friends involved not to mention RAVI!? The Pippa I knew would NEVER.
Also, the amount of times people “sniffed” in this book was ASTRONOMICAL. Every single page, it felt like, had someone sniffing with emotion.
Not the books fault but the narrator turned on the emotional reading to 11 on this one and it just added to the cringe.
I felt like Jackson wanted to heighten the emotional impact and honestly it just didn't work. All the self sacrificing Pippa was trying to do just felt so forced and unnecessary. With her previous PTSD trauma and now with murder on her conscious there is no way she wouldn't have crumpled like a paper cup and confessed or spilled the beans to someone. She was an absolute mess. Talk about beating heart in the floorboards.
The fact that the chief was an absolute bumbling fool for two books and now suddenly is on to Pippa again felt like lazy writing. There was no foundation for that other than to create suspense.
And finally, her long, drawn-out break up with Ravi was created as this big eventful, emotional moment but shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. And was completely negated by the epilogue. This was another cringe moment for me.
Really disappointed. I'll pretend this book isn't part of the series because the first two are amazing.