In Focus

The latest book club book we read was North Dakota Neighbor by Marlene Chabot. This one was not well received by the group.

The book follows a private investigator, Matt Malone, on two different cases. In one case he is trying to find a husband that took off with some family heirlooms and is ghosting his family. The other is whether the site of a new school in Anoka was a Native American burial ground. Sounded interesting to us...at first...

Turns out it wasn’t very exciting. The book was overly descriptive on Malone’s every move, instead of where the descriptiveness was needed such as on things related to the case. It was quite odd.

As one member put it, “It was like she was taking a short story and trying to make it longer.”

I do like it when books get descriptive, but this was just mundane and unnecessary. I did finish the book, but others didn’t because it just annoyed them so much.

In the book, there is a story of two Native Americans from different tribes that fell in love. The boy left his tribe to find the girl’s tribe. That was probably a better story than the whole rest of the book.

We figured the book took place somewhere in the 1990s as he rarely used his flip phone. And landlines were still heavily used. Also, the internet wasn’t much of a thing as he would drive around to different locations to gather information.

The investigator’s relationship with his girlfriend was odd, as they would go weeks without seeing or speaking to each other. And he would hang out regularly with his elderly neighbor. The neighbor liked to get a little too involved in his work.

Even the small bit of action in the book was anti-climactic. It wasn’t the worst book we’ve read, but our ratings were pretty low.

The next book on the list is Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik. It sounds like a good book for summer and hopefully, it’s on the happy and humorous side.