Crime Writer has been on my Kindle shelf for about a month maybe a little longer. The longer it sat there the more I second-guessed requesting it. The premise became sillier in my mind and I was really afraid of the execution. Yesterday at around 4:30pm I decided that I would at least give it a shot, I finished it at 2am this morning. Did I only get four hours of sleep because of this? Do I regret it? Not in the least. I was hooked from almost the very first sentence!
Evie Howland is living almost a fairy tale life; she is currently engaged to be married to billionaire playboy Daniel Bradley, she's living in her modest "dream home" in NYC, and all of this is thanks to her best selling crime novel series featuring Detectives Carolyn Harding and Jay Ryan. Well, it would be a fairy tale life except for the first time in ten years Evie has writer's block. And what's worse her characters are not letting her forget that she has writer's block. Not only are they interrupting her at the most inconvenient times to remind her that they have been on the same stakeout for weeks they are now injecting themselves into her everyday life! What? Your characters don't talk to you? I assure you this is very normal. Well, it is until it's not. Because it's not just Evie that can see Carolyn and Jay any longer. Everyone can. And as Evie must face the fact that not only are her characters alive and are currently wearing her clothes and borrowing her shower but that all of her characters are alive, not just the two who are her closest and dearest friends, but their arch-nemesis The Blade as well. Evie, Carolyn, and Jay must somehow stop a deranged, brilliant serial killer who up until forty-eight hours ago was only real in Evie's head. And to do it Evie may have to do the one thing she is most afraid of; end the stories of the two people she loves most in the world.
I do not believe I have ever read anything that has broken the fourth wall so completely, so expertly in my life. I'm sure there are other books out there where the author's characters come to life, Evie even mentions that there are in this book, however, I have so many questions about what the hell happened specifically here. Sheppard wraps you up so completely in Evie's world and in turn this kind of weird other dimension where fictional characters are maybe living a completely separate and *real* life that finishing this is like coming out of an oddly specific dream. It was absolutely brilliant!
The entire story is told from Evie's point of view and right from the beginning you get the feeling there is something more to the story than just some cheesy gimmicky story about characters becoming real. Evie alludes to something going very wrong in her life within the first few chapters, something's happened and she's essentially cut the world off, she is not really living. She's just going through the motions of life. Billionaire wants to marry her and offers her everything her heart desires, maybe there's something a bit off about it, but Evie ignores that and just goes with it. You have this feeling pretty much the entire book that Evie is not happy. And then there is this scene; Evie has been kidnapped, she has this feeling that she can write things into existence and so she tries it a few ways and those don't work but she has a flash of insight and writes I AM. Two little words, three short letters that are deceptively simple. Because in the book and in real life they are the beginning of magic. They can be used to harm, they can be used to uplift but they are the beginning of writing yourself into your own story. And that's it, the moment when this went from a really good book to an exceptional book because all of it becomes so relatable at that point, Evie up until this point had written herself out of her own story. And this is something that many of us do for a multitude of reasons; Evie's was a traumatic event but people do this every single solitary day for reasons ranging from becoming a parent to working a soul-sucking job and of course trauma. I AM becomes: We Are or worse I Was. And in real life, changing it back to I AM is just as difficult as it is in fiction, minus the fictional characters coming to life of course. There are a lot of smaller themes throughout this as well that are deeper than anything I expected when I started reading this but that's the overall theme. And it is done so wonderfully with such an amazing character that you want to hug Evie and tell her everything is going to be fine.
So that's the main theme but there is also all of the fourth wall breaking and it is a trip. As I said I finished this around two am and ended up staying up another hour just pondering the implications of this book. Because it's just mind-blowing, in a fictional manner of course. Are authors writing entire dimensions into existence? If Evie has created this whole world when she stops writing the series do they just live or do they cease to exist? How do they know so much about Evie, I mean sure they are a part of her so to speak, but, I mean Jay and Carolyn know pretty much everything about her. And if Evie is in love with a man she created then does that whole paragraph I just wrote about writing herself back into her story mean absolutely nothing because she literally created her perfect man like some weird Frankenstein's Monster type thing. And is this like a kind of Wreck-it Ralph type thing where all fictional characters end up in some central location, central universe if you will; like is Eve Dallas hanging out with Matthew Bartholomew as we speak? Normally, it would annoy me to no end that I have so many questions but I'm not annoyed in the least, I can really interpret this whole thing however I want to and it doesn't feel like there's some giant plot hole. Catching a killer was more important than examining how this whole thing worked and that was pretty clear. And I appreciate Sheppard making it clear. There's a few times where maybe she could have gone down some path to explore how this all worked but she didn't, she has a character kind of arch a brow and then sets them back on the path of stopping the killer because that's what's really important here.
The characters in this were all really great too and while it is told from Evie's POV you get a really good feel for everyone else. And even though Carolyn comes across as kind of a jerk, you can't help but love her because Evie loves her. This is a pretty long book and so I was afraid that at some point it feel like it was dragging on but it never did. Sheppard does a really good job of keeping the pace up with intense action scenes and mixing in Evie's self-exploration. And the romance of course. And Evie is absolutely hilarious, she's got that perfect smart-ass attitude that's clearly a self-defense mechanism from the beginning. I'm not ashamed to admit I relate to that.
Overall, Crime Writer has a great cast of characters with a fast-paced plot that twists and turns in manners that you don't see coming because it's a book about cliches that have a mind of their own. And it truly has something for everyone in it. There is not one group of readers I'd specifically recommend this to. It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit murder mystery, a tad bit of a thriller, a slow-burner romance, and a novel of introspection to boot that somehow even with all that going on works out to be just a fantastic book that almost defies classification.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ruby Books for the eArc of this book, this review is being left voluntarily.
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