whitneydaniell

Synopsis

When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story–and giving a voice to the voiceless.

Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten. All until Masey James, a 15-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot. Putting the rest of her work and her fraying personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires because, there’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.

I. The Story / Plot

Masey James’ murder has sent shockwaves through our entire community, leaving everyone grappling with the unsettling notion that her killer could still be out there. Masey, your quintessential girl next door, has left us all wondering, what could have possibly led to this tragedy? The initial police response added to the public’s frustration as they brushed off her disappearance as a mere runaway situation.

While reporting on the mysterious case, journalist Jordan Manning finds herself deeply entangled in the investigation. Jordan is asking all the right questions and talking to all the right people, but here’s the kicker – she’s flying solo without the protection of the Chicago Police Department. This move seems to be steering her right into the danger zone, but as Jordan pulls on one unraveling thread of the investigation, she discovers connections to a dark underworld of trafficking and various other crimes.

Now, let me tell you, this story reads like an over-the-top narrative featuring a reporter with enough free time to rival a superhero and a police force that’s so competent, that I’m not sure there’s a word for it. It’s almost too unbelievable in many ways. Without giving away too much, I’d like to highlight some glaring issues I had with the story.

• Jordan is simply a reporter, she is not a detective, nor has she been hired by the police department to do freelance, contracted work. At one point, she is tailing a “suspect” — if he can even be called that because he’s only a suspect to her — in stiletto heels. “I could be more clandestine moving around on my stilettoed feet.” WHAT!? You can’t even dress the part when doing recognizance work!
• On more than one occasion her direct supervisor has called her reckless and spelled out to her that she is not an officer but a reporter, and yet, everytime it fell on deaf ears. “No, Jordan, you’re the one who needs to understand! Stay in your lan. You’re doing too much. You could end up doing more harm than good. You are a reporter, okay? You are not an investigator.”
• Speaking of more harm than good, where did she get a state certified evidence collection kit? Just out of nowhere, it’s in her purse. At no point in the story do they tell us, the reader, where she got that kit.

There are so many other instances I could point out but, I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone.

II. The Characters

There are a host of characters, who are all introduced with way too many unnecessary, which was actually strange and off-putting to me. For example, introducing a character would look something like this, “Terry Jones was my very best friend in the third-grade at, Main Street Elementary School in Main Streetville, US and I always knew she would be successful because she was at the top of her class at Harvard in Massachusetts and was the first, woman to ever wear pink while being a millionaire and working for a billionaire…” Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Very descriptive for absolutely no reason and, for characters that were not important to the story, didn’t move the plot along, and as a reader, you may never see again in the story!

But as for the core group of characters in this story, Jordan Manning by far is the one who irritated me the most! She is reckless, careless, selfish, thoughtless, and annoying. In a real-world setting, everything she did outside of reporting the news, was a hindrance to the police investigation and she would have been arrested for obstructing an active investigation.

Joseph Samuels, Joey as Jordan calls him, is just as stupid as she is and should be fired! While I get that some cops and reporters have close relationships and things are leaked to the press in that manner, he was borderline incompetent and it seemed like at every turn, he was only relying on Jordan to feed him evidence. Is he not a real cop?

Thomas, the trainer, if a “beta man” were a thing, it’d be him. He let Jordan walk all over him and yet, he showed back up every time ready to lay down and let her do it again. If not by her actions, certainly by her words, she made it more than clear that she wanted nothing more from this man, and yet… here he is with flowers in a suit *gag*. He deserved better but if he can’t see that then, it ain’t my problem. Harold “Bass” Brantley, was cool, not sure what he added to the story but it seemed that Jordan had more of a heart for him than Thomas!

The cops are dumb. Her friends are enablers. Her bosses, Ellen and Peter, should have fired her so I really can’t take them seriously. Her mother and father should have been on a plane to Chicago, periodt!

Honestly, not a single redeeming character in this wild tale. It’s like a parade of dysfunction, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

III. The Writing

As a, Temple University, graduate who also came from the School of Communications and Theater with a B.A. in Journalism, I have to give my fellow Owl some grace. By her own account, this story lived with her for decades, so I’d have to imagine that, she needed to get the words on the page and didn’t want to compromise her vision by taking a beat to flesh everything out. I’m giving her a pass on the writing.

IV. My Final Thoughts

The story is all over the place and filled with situations that I could not conceive would actually happen. The descriptions are wordy and the dialogue is, meh. There were too many threads that appeared but had no beginning or end like they were just thrown in there to further the conversation surrounding how young black men and women are treated. This book came off, to me, like a soapbox that Tamron Hall needed to stand on to scream from the mountain tops – “Black Lives Matter’. The focus was so much on that message that, the storytelling was lacking and the writing was overdone. The characters were surface, especially the main protagonist, Jordan. She plays fast and loose and, in times where should could show compassion and really come into a different light for the reader, she is cold and nonchalant.

Did I like the book? Eh.

Will I read the next book in this series? Yes because, #SupportBlackWomen #RootForEverybodyBlack