Reviewing Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Phillippe

I love a good thriller. I love simple and even complicated plots. I especially love well-developed characters. Sometimes though, plots can be overly complicated and understanding everything about a character and their family can be too much. I recently read Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Philippe and felt that it was a book with a great, albeit overly complicated, plot and overly developed (words I never thought I would say) characters. To me, this left me feeling like this book just missed the mark. It's a story with great potential, but to me it's a book that needs to be edited and polished before it will be something great. See my full review below.

Looking for Will by Jane Collins-Philippe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is a thriller set in and around Ontario about a family on their way home from vacation in Calgary when their little boy goes missing from the back seat of the vehicle. The plot, all too real, centers around the boy, Will, that was supposed to be asleep in the car and the two parents fighting so much that they didn't notice the little boy was missing until they were to their motel.

The plot, writing and pacing is great through and especially including Chapter 2. After that...

The book is told from a lot of different perspectives. Too many if you ask me. There is Davide and Jan Dewhurst, the parents of a boy who goes missing from the car, Sergeant Patricia Hayes, an old couple Gracie and Gabe Fortune living in the middle of nowhere and the weird guy with a dark secret, Matthew Pepperal. All of the voices/perspectives made for a really complex plot but at the cost of sometimes being confusing and losing the readers overall interest.

When it came to learning all about the Fortune family, which is significant to the overall plot, there was too much talking about the characters and not enough showing us about the characters. I'm not entirely sure I needed to know the back stories into each of the kids.

It is clear that the book, characters and plot are very well developed. I just don't feel the book itself is well polished and there were lots of areas where it could have been improved to make me, or any reader, like it more.

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**Disclaimer - I was provided a free copy of this book by Booktasters in exchange for an honest review.**