Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Unabiding Halls
AUTHOR: C.E. Case
PUBLISHER: Supposed Crimes
LENGTH: 185 pages
RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2019
BLURB:
Shelby is a part-time assistant women’s soccer coach at Winston College, a small liberal arts school in North Carolina. Directionless at 25, she is unprepared for the upheaval in her life when one of her players is murdered.
Earlene is a rookie patrol cop working on her criminal justice degree. When a murder occurs at the soccer field, Earlene is asked to be a bridge between the police and the Winston community.
The students are rocked by the loss of a classmate, but mistrusting of police and outsiders. Earlene and Shelby must navigate campus politics, student secrets, and threats to their own lives.
REVIEW:
This book has a great main character who is doing her best to solve an incredibly dull mystery. It isn’t the fault of Shelby, our soccer coach amateur sleuth, or her rookie cop partner-turned-love-interest, Earlene. This feels like a half-cooked mystery, one that never digs too deep, despite plenty of material to mine from. It’s a beginner’s mystery at best.
I love a good small-town mystery, but when it came to solving the strangulation and public body dumping of a flighty soccer player at this story’s beginning, there’s just not much there in terms of drama or plot. I like how Shelby and Earlene are both considered outsiders on the case and have to use the bare minimum of resources to try to solve it, but they really have nothing, and all the people of interest are so dull that I never once was truly eager to find out who the killer was. The bitter ex subplot fizzled out before gaining any traction, and in the end, when we find out who the killer is, it’s rote and unsatisfying. On a mystery level, I just wasn’t engaged with this book.
But the main character is so good! I totally love Shelby as our slacker anti-hero. She’s working part time at a job she’s not really passionate about, hanging around her old Winston College campus, drinking too much and sleeping with the wrong people. She doesn’t have a car and dresses in sweats and beanies almost 24/7. She’s the listless millennial heroine we deserve, and I really liked her from the start. She’s not even that likable, she’s just so real we have to admire her. And her clueless bumbling as she tries to play detective on a small campus where everyone already knows her is hilarious and sad.
On the other hand, Earlene, a rookie cop taking criminal justice classes at the college, is a much fuzzier character, and I only bought her chemistry with Shelby in the last quarter of the book. Though she’s the same age as Shelby, she reads as about ten years older, constantly talking down to Shelby and acting more like a chiding parent than a potential love interest. I like her dynamic with her mother, but we needed more of it to get a feel for her, and her tragic backstory that comes to light at the end feels completely shoehorned. By the end, she and Shelby have acquired a good, easy dynamic with dry humor and banter, but it took way too long for us to click with them.
My middling rating for this book hinges on both a weak plot and awkward chemistry between the two main characters. My heart never felt into this story, and I was never terribly invested in either of the conclusion or the romance. But C.E. Case can write an awesome main character, so I’d be interested to see a character like Shelby within a meatier story.
RATING: 
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