It's winter in San Francisco, and a series of odd murders has flummoxed the SFPD. Thankfully, Deputy Chief Bob Martin is getting an assist from his teenage daughter, Amanda, and a crew of her friends, who have begun investigating the murders as an offshoot of their online game, Ripper. The tension ratchets up when Amanda's mom (and Martin's ex-wife) is kidnapped, possibly by the killer.
This is my first stab at reading Allende, who I'd heard great things about, and I've got to say, I was underwhelmed. Some of that can be blamed on the translation of Ripper, which resulted in plenty of awkward phrasings and repetition. But the story becomes so convoluted, and tries to weave in the back stories of way too many characters, and the blame for that lies solely with Allende. She admits in the acknowledgments at the end of the book that this was her first stab at a murder mystery; it shows, and unless she seriously ups her game, I hope this will be her last foray into that genre. Will I read another of her books? Maybe. But probably not until I get the bad taste of Ripper out of my mouth.
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