Bad Sister by Sam Carrington

A cold dark night interrupted by fire.

Bad Sister starts with a pretty dramatic scene, two children standing outside of their burning home while watching their trapped father scream from his bedroom window. Said Sister is furious with him for starting the fire and is sure to tell the police that it was him. He always played with fire and now he's burned the house down. 


Fast forward several years and we are introduced to a whole slew of dramatic mysteries. A prisoner is found dead outside of the prison gates with markings on his body and the name of a woman on the palm of his hand. A therapist who has changed her name to salvage her psychiatric practice is trying to hide from a public scandal tied to the dead prisoner. Add to that, a patient of the psychiatrist is a woman with a young son who are both in the witness protection program and trying to build a new life.

A few too many story lines

The book was a little hard to remain interested in because of the various points of view. We are in a different mindset of each character at each chapter. That is not uncommon and it can really work, there were just too many people to jump between. I found it difficult to uncover who this book was truly about. It sounded like it was about the ¨Bad Sister¨from the title; however, it's quite a while before we realize who in the story is the sister. Even longer to figure out why she was "bad". Having read the whole story I still feel like the story was less about the siblings and more about a completely unrelated story line. This book was truly dedicated to a different single character and could have been titled differently.

I did get fully intrigued at about 60% of the book because that is when the various story lines all started to weave together. I wasn't able to fully predict all of the answers to all of the mysteries so it did keep me entertained in the end. The author has a very creative mind to be able to weave together so many complexities to fit into one story. I feel that several of the situations in this book could have been explored in individual books rather than just this one.