High & Dry by Sarah Skilton - Review

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I found an ARC of High & Dry by Sarah Skilton at my local Goodwill and thought the blurb sounded interesting.

This is the blurb on my ARC copy:

Charlie Dixon is having a bad week. Framed for a stranger's near-fatal overdose at a party, blackmailed into finding a mysterious flash drive that everyone in school seems anxious to suppress, and pressured by his shady best friend to throw an upcoming match, high school soccer player Charlie Dixon is dealing with more than his share of drama. Add a broken heart -- and the drinking he's been doing to soothe it -- and he's near the breaking point. In this fast-paced, multilayered mystery, Charlie spends a frantic week trying to clear his name, win back the girl of his dreams, and escape a past friendship that may be responsible for all his current problems. This book captures the tone and style of the best crime fiction while also telling a high-stakes story of peer pressure gone tragically awry, from Sarah Skilton, the author of the critically acclaimed Bruised.

I gave it fifty pages, but I found I just didn't care enough about the Charlie or the mystery to continue the story so I quit reading, sorry. Like the blurb says about tone and style of the best crime fiction, I would agree Charlie's voice does remind me of a detective in a film noir movie or a hard-boiled crime fiction novel. Unfortunately, the author doesn't quite pull it off. It just sounds incredibly out of place to my ears.

I gave High & Dry a shot, but it just wasn't for me.


I read this from September 15 - 16, 2014 and my review is also on Goodreads.