A Stone Cold Murder: A Paranormal Murder Mystery with Psychic Sleuth (Reluctantly Psychic Murder Mystery Book 1)

This book was an ARC and while that doesn’t change my opinion in any way, shape, or form, I have to include that little tidbit. I was initially intrigued when I read the book blurb for A Stone Cold Murder because I found the concept of a person who could see the emotions / events that are tied to objects interesting. This interest continued upon starting the book because I’m always a big fan of women moving to a remote town to start over. My interest was also piqued because I’m fascinated by the work geologists do - there are so many different rocks and crystals all with their own history, it truly is fascinating. However, this interest continued to deteriorate as the book continued. I found the main character to be whiny and unwilling to accept and own her gift. While her feelings are valid I think her continuance to dwell on it in a self deprecating, and self pitying, way made it difficult to feel for her and the hardships of her past. I understood and related to her trust issues but her inability to work on them became repetitive in a way that I found myself being more annoyed with her than anything. Beyond this I found her character to be rather bland. This feeling extended to many of the background characters as well. I felt like much of what we knew about everyone was very surface level and with how short this book was I would have rather seen more pages with more emphasis on getting to know the characters so the reader could connect with them in a meaningful way. I think the story could have benefited from having fewer background characters. There were a lot of people - with many introductions - and many of them did not add anything to the plot but rather just took time away from the characters that did matter. My second issue with this book was the pacing. I felt like too much had happened over the course of 3 days and with the intensity of each scene continuing to grow I would have liked a bit of a reprieve. With main event after main event happening I often felt like a victim of mental whiplash and I had a hard time wanting to continue the book. As the book progressed I enjoyed the plot less and less because the speed of the pacing made it difficult to appreciate - so much of my mental energy was focused on keeping up. This pacing also impacted the ability to connect with the characters, so again, I think this book would have benefited from additional pages to allow the reader to soak in everything that was happening while having time to connect with the characters on a deeper level. All of that being said I think the author has a keen eye for detail. As someone who has visited New Mexico quite a few times I could see the accuracy in the setting descriptions and I could easily envision where our main character, Petra, was residing. Despite the lack of reader connection with the characters I did find that the characters had a good dynamic with one another. The dialogue was well thought out and each conversation was important to the plot. These positives allowed me to bump up my rating from one star to two.