Review: Guilt by Association

Title: Guilt by Association (Rachel Knight #1)

Author: Marcia Clark

Genre: Mystery

Published: April 20, 2011

I received this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rachel was a prosecuting attorney. One of her best friends was found in a motel room in an apparent murder/suicide with an underage teen. After his death Rachel received some of her friend's cases one of which was a rape of a teenage girl. Rachel and her cop friend Bailey set out to solve the two cases.

This is one of the few mysteries I have read recently where I didn't figure out who was the bad guy. My main problem was the characterization. The characters were somewhat flat, which made them easy to forget. There were the characters we encountered multiple times or those which were directly involved with the crimes, they were easier to remember. Then there were all the people who Rachel and Bailey interviewed. We would only see some of them for a couple of paragraphs and then never talk to or about them again. When the mystery was solved I had a difficult time trying to remember who the people involved were, so it made the story less satisfying.

The book started out talking about how much a workaholic Rachel was, but throughout the story the characteristic was not shown. Yes, she worked a lot and all the people she associated with were people from work, but she spent a lot of time drinking, going places to eat, going on dates and obsessing over her semi existent diet. I didn't understand why we spent so much of the introduction focusing her lack of life outside of work when the rest of the story showed the opposite.

I liked being involved in the procedure of the crime solving. From the beginning Rachel showed us exactly who she needed to deal with and what she needed to accomplish in order to get a prosecuting. I was impressed she was able to use the connections she had made throughout her career and that she was able to make more of those connections. I could see her using some of the new connections she made in this book throughout the up coming books in the series.

Overall I gave this book 4 stars out of 5.