Ready to Die by Lisa Jackson

This is one of the first crime novels I read where my favourite character was the one who was in a coma for the entire book. Well actually, I did like a few of the non-comatose characters, but not as much (I suppose when the comatose character is the well-liked sheriff you can't help but root for him).

Ready To Die starts with the death of an un-named women, whom we later find out is a judge. Then, the book jumps to the local police station and we get a feel of how things work. And then someone tries to kill the sheriff Dan (and almost succeeds). The rest of the book is about trying to find the murderer.

What I liked in the book was the complexity of the characters. There aren't any 'good' characters, except perhaps Dan. And to be honest, I don't particularly like many of these characters, but that may be due to another issue. Let's just say for now, that these characters are wonderfully human and flawed.

But, and this is a big but, this book was confusing. While there's nothing wrong with writing from multiple perspective, but the book switched between them too fast. It took me a long to differentiate between the characters. Granted, that may be a e-galley problem, because there was no "-------" or "*****" that normally separates too different sections. Without those visual cues, I was quite disoriented, and I didn't really know which character was which for a while (Which is probably why I didn't like them as much as I should have).

I'm hoping that the formatting issues will be resolved when the book is officially published - if not for it, I would have enjoyed this book a lot more.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.