WORDHUNTER

3.5 stars out of 5

You know the old marketing rule - sell the sizzle, not the steak? Well, this book has plenty of steak. Sizzle? Not so much. 

In theory, the unique subject matter alone should, IMHO, make it a shoe-in as the start of a highly successful series - I mean, forensic linguistics? A lead character whose passion is diagramming sentences? Never in my word-loving, wildest dreams! In practice, though, the story screams for more character development, cohesiveness and, for want of a better word, pizzazz. 

Here's the scoop: College grad student Maggie Moore loves words, and she's studying forensic linquistics. One afternoon she's called into her professor's office, where he says the local police need help with a cyberstalker who's been sending threatening texts and he recommended Maggie. He follows that up by asking her to be his research assistant. When Maggie agrees - reluctantly - she calls police detective Silas Jackson, who just as reluctantly agrees to let her help. That successful effort comes just as the local mayor's young daughter goes missing - a suspected abduction - so Jackson and the police chief ask her to keep helping.

Once again, she's reluctant - mostly because her closest childhood friend, Lucy, pulled a similar disappearing act a decade or so ago and was never found. To Maggie, that was due in large part to a lack of police follow-up, so she's carrying a grudge. But she caves, and begins studying all the written communications from a variety of suspects to gather clues, compose a profile and, hopefully, narrow the list down to one. As she researches, ruminates and rambles through her knowledge base (extensive, but a little convoluted for readers to comprehend easily), her sentence diagrams appear. Those, I suppose, are relevant, but I'll never know because they were too small to read on my Kindle (yes, I could have pulled out a magnifying glass, but that would have taken away much of the enjoyment of reading). 

Maggie's been carrying around a fair amount of baggage from her past, and as it turns out, so has Jackson; so of course, they're at loggerheads almost from the git-go. But they manage to hold hands to keep from fighting, and in the process, Jackson agrees to re-look into Lucy's disappearing act. That sets other things in motion, including fodder for the next book (assuming there will be one).

If for no other reason than the intriguing subject matter, I really wanted to like both Maggie and Jackson; but both come off more like cariacatures than real people. Maggie smokes Camels like a chimney, drinks beer for breakfast, has more tattoos than any biker gang and a vocabulary far more colorful than any truck driver I've ever known (I don't have an issue with smutty language, but this is way over the top). Hints of their background stories should have made me sympathize, but the descriptions are so sketchy and disjointed that the only thing I felt was "Okay, so what - you're both grown-ups now, so get over it."

The bottom line for me is this: what's here is a more than respectable start that elicits hope of better efforts to come. I love the premise - and like that spaghetti sauce commercial, it's in there; give the next one some serious polishing, and it's gonna shine. Till then, I thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to get in on the action early on by way of a pre-release copy.

Wordhunter by Stella Sands (Harper Paperbacks, August 2024); 253 pp.