review copy; 272 pages
You Can Go Home Now by Michael Elias is a so-so violent, dark, gritty procedural.
Nina Karim is a detective who has a series of cold case homicides on her desk and only anger and revenge in her heart. The cold cases all involve men who were killed when their widows were living in Artemis, a battered women's shelter. Nina decides to go undercover and enters Artemis, searching for any connection to the cold case murders. Nina is doing her job, but her real and only true goal as a police officer is to find sniper who killed her father when she was a teen in 1999 and take out her wrath and find revenge on him. Her father was a doctor at an abortion clinic and was targeted by a group that called itself the Army of God.
This isn't probably a great time to have a book out where a police officer is only full of anger and the drive to take revenge on someone no matter the cost. Especially the fact that she says she only joined the force to extract punishment and revenge. Nina is a mess. She's unlikable, unethical, and seems to be missing a few vital brain cells. Her boyfriend is an unbelievable character. I didn't care for the connection to a shelter for abused women. I didn't like the exception, the pass Nina is given for working in a gray ethical arena just because her personal vendetta is just and ended up feeling like I was being pandered to as a woman. Oh please.
You Can Go Home Now is a hot mess. Everything seemed way-too-coincidental and the narrative jumped around too much. It was a struggle to finish reading and I kept telling myself to make it a DNF and go on to better things. Two stars because I managed to finish it.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
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