Mirrored Image, Alice K. Arenz

Cassie Chase is a reporter whose column usually focuses on being light and fun.  But when a woman named Lynette is killed, and it turns out she looks exacly like Cassie, she is made lead reporter on the story.  The further she delves into the investigation, the more similarities between the two women are uncovered.  What can it all mean, and will Cassie suffer the same fate?

This book had promise, it really really did.  The overall storyline is good, but I think as a whole, the book is awkward.  For me, there were way too many key characters, and they were never developed well enough, so I was constantly confusing characters.  It made for a very staccato rhythm to the flow of the story.  I think if the characters were more fully developed, or the reader was made to care about them a little more, this would not have been so much of an issue, though there were still way too many characters involved in the action.

Also, for a book whose very title and premise center around women looking identical, there is a lot of emphasis on the fact that the women do not actually look identical.  Cassie herself sees little resemblance at first.  There is this weird dichotomy of some characters seeing no resemblance, and some characters confusing the two women because they look so similar.  To me, this just felt like a disconnect.

I am particularly disheartened by the way we see Lynette's character develop throughout the story.  We never actually meet her, as she is dead when the story begins, but from all we learn about her, she is painted to look like a total lunatic.  I think her side of the story would have made for for literary symmetry.  Even her diary is chock full of crazy.

All in all, this was not a horrible book, it had a lot of nice moments of suspense.  But it certainly was not for me.  Perhaps die hard fans of suspense and thriller books will feel differently.


I received a touring review copy of the book from Crazy Book Tours.