A FAMILIAR SIGHT BY BRIANNA LABUSKES

8/14/2021

A Familiar Sight is certainly a unique story as the female lead is a sociopath AND police consultant. However, I found the book to be too long (and a bit dull) when it comes to the actual plot.

Rating: ★★★
Release Date: August 1, 2021
Genre: Police/Detective Procedural
Series: Dr. Gretchen White series #1
Pages: 367 pages
Format: eBook. Source: Amazon First Reads

A shocking murder carries echoes of the past for a psychologist in a startling novel of suspense by a Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestselling author.

Psychologist and criminologist Dr. Gretchen White is a specialist in antisocial personality disorders and violent crimes. She’s helped solve enough prominent cases for detective Patrick Shaughnessy that her own history is often overlooked: Gretchen is an admitted sociopath once suspected of killing her aunt. Shaughnessy still thinks Gretchen got away with murder. It’s not going to happen again.

When a high-profile new case lands on Shaughnessy’s desk, it seems open and shut. Remorseless teenager Viola Kent is accused of killing her mother. Amid stories of childhood horrors and Viola’s cruel manipulations, the bad seed has already been found guilty by a rapt public. But Gretchen might be seeing something in Viola no

one else does: herself.

If Viola is a scapegoat, then who really did it? And what are they hiding? To find the truth, Gretchen must enter a void that is not only dark and cold-blooded, but also frighteningly familiar.

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𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗘𝗪 𝗦𝗡𝗔𝗣𝗦𝗛𝗢𝗧: A Familiar Sight is certainly a unique story as the female lead is a sociopath AND police consultant. However, I found the book to be too long (and a bit dull) when it comes to the actual plot.

This book is a little hard for me to review because there were a lot of things that I liked but also a things that I didn’t because it didn’t feel cohesive to the story. I hate when this happens! When I read a book, I want to either LOVE it or HATE it but this one just falls in the middle. It’s good but there were too many things that got on my nerves which prevented me from having any strong feelings about it. I’ll discuss those below.

First and foremost, I found this book to be unique because the female lead is a sociopath (who may or may not have killed her aunt when she was 8 years old). I feel like the author will clarify this in later books but for now whether she did kill her aunt is still a mystery. Anyway, Gretchen is a sociopath, but she is also a highly esteemed psychologist and police consultant. She’s been working on some cases with the local police department and has had a lot of success probably because she can pick out other sociopaths like her. Must be a weird knack these individuals have! They can essentially “read” people that are similar to them. In this book, her and two detectives are working a case where a 13-year-old girl allegedly killed her mother in cold blood. Things of course are not always what they seem and whether this girl is a true psychopath or not is to be determined as they get deeper into the case… This entire narrative is extremely intriguing to me as a reader, and I loved that this book was based on a child killer. Unfortunately, the author didn’t elaborate enough on this child and took the story in so many different directions that the case at hand became stunted. I would have loved to learn more about Viola (the kid) and how her psychopathy played a part in everything but there simply wasn’t enough. It was all very disappointing.

Another thing that got on my nerves was the switching between past and present. Normally, giving flashbacks and such is a good thing for the story, but the author did NOT write the past in consecutive order. It was all over the place making the book very confusing. This is the first time I’ve seen this in a novel and wouldn’t want to see it again!

Finally, I think the middle of the novel was filled with too much fluff. It could have been shorter and not felt so dull had the author condensed some of the stuff she wrote. Honestly, if you wanted to skip over whole paragraphs it wouldn’t have made much a difference, you’d still get the gist of what was going on! This doesn’t work for me.

All in all, I’d day this book teeters on the okay/good line. Would I read the next book in the series? I think I’d give it a try if only to see what happened with Gretchen’s case when she was a child. Am I totally excited about it? No. I could take it or leave it.

𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗙𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗙𝗔𝗡𝗦 𝗢𝗙:
• Police procedurals and detective fiction
• Mysteries and thrillers
• Authors like J.D. Robb, Kendra Elliot, and Melinda Leigh

𝗠𝗬 𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚: ⭐⭐⭐