Second Chance Killer by Bradley Cornish

Genre: Christian Thriller

Format: Electronic/Kindle

Pages: 652  

Start Date: July 23rd, 2023

End Date: August 5th, 2023

Overall: ★ 

Character Development: ★★ 

Ending: -★ 

Recommend: NO!

 🚨 May Contain Spoilers, Continue at Your Own Risk 🚨

     No, that is not a type-o. I actually gave the ending of this book a negative star. I’ll get to that in a minute, though. 

     Where do I start? To say I struggled to finish this book would be a severe understatement. After finding a few small mistakes in the beginning, I started taking a screenshot of the pages whenever I found a writing error. After a couple chapters, I had to stop given the numbers of photographs that were bogging down my picture album. It took my so long to finish this book because I actually had to put it down and read a different book while I was in the middle of reading this one. My mind just needed a pallet cleanser; all of the mistakes were just mentally draining.

     First off, I received this book from BookSirens in exchange for my honest review….and boy, will you guys get it! This book is just bad... I don’t even know how else to describe it. The grammatical errors are so frequent, it was actually made the storyline and plot confusing. Periods instead of question marks, missing quotations, not to mention characters’ names being spelled three or four different ways (even in the same paragraph!). Not only was it confusing at times, it was really off-putting to try and continue to read. Am I reading a thought? Oh, no, this character is supposedly still speaking…. 

     On top of elementary school punctuation errors, there were deeper things that attributed to the low rating. Things such as first person narratives changing in the middle of a chapter, characters addressing other characters that weren’t even in the scene, and wrong names being used to address other characters are just some of what I am talking about. I wish I could say that was all that was wrong with this book, but wait, there’s more! Characters randomly dying and coming back to life….like come on! I wish I could say it only happened once….but it didn’t. It happened TWICE! Derrick dies one minute, then is in a coma the next. Olivia is alive and calling characters one morning, then passed in her sleep the previous day. I’m not even talking about an off comment that lead to the confusion. It was pages of the narrative. A couple chapters talking about Derrick’s death and his funeral. An entire chapter about Olivia. It almost felt like the author used voice-text to write the book then just forgot to proof-read it.

     Personally, I feel like this really would’ve benefitted from being spit into two different books. Book 1: the story of Damon/David and the murder of Susan Bigley. Book 2: The Gath and saving the world. I really don’t see how the two storylines correlated except for that David was in both parts. I thought at first maybe Colin, Susan’s son, was the one who killed her since the book took such a drastic turn with his storyline, but no. It also desperately needs a lot of editing. I read sentences that were repetitive, thoughts that were the same but just reworded several times, even dialogue that almost seemed like the author deleted half of it given how fragmented the topics were. I’m not trying to sound dramatic but when I finally finished this book, I was exhausted. The two separate plot ideas were interesting enough, but it missed the mark so badly that it wasn’t even on the target.