Cover Me In Darkness by Eileen Rendahl- Book Review

When I saw the cover and the description for Cover Me In Darkness by Eileen Rendahl, I was drawn in immediately.*

Amanda gets a call from a the local psychiatric ward where her mother is staying- her mother has committed suicide. Her mother is in the ward for killing Amanda's baby brother after being brainwashed by a religious cult that Amanda was a part of too.

It is now time for the cult's leader to be released from jail and that is when Amanda's mother kills herself. It turns out someone slipped her mother a sharpened comb, a picture of Amanda's brother, and news clippings of the murder. It is looking as if Amanda's mother was coerced to kill herself.

Then other things start happening, Amanda is poisoned, thrown in front of a car, and other odd things start to happen. Are these all connected to the cult?

In the meantime, there is a side story of Amanda working at her job on a product about to receive FDA approval. If approved, it will make her company rich, but the testing results seem too perfect. Is this connected too?

The premise of this book sounded incredible and it was what drew me to the book. The problem was the writing. I cannot put any quotes in my review as I received this as a galley, but the writing is very simplistic and at times have sentence fragments. I am not a grammar person by a long shot, but it was bad enough that I noticed.

Rendahl has a background in YA novels and romance novels and her writing style showed as she moved into this genre. As I was reading it, I even wondered if this was a murder mystery for a YA audience. I would not be so critical, but the writing is what really detracted from this book.

I don't enjoy panning books as I know how difficult it is to write and publish a book, but this one was not enjoyable by the end. Some of the conclusions just seemed too quick and some of the murders happen to easily. The end confrontation, for example, is about two pages long and then it is over.

Sadly, this is a 2 star for me due to the premise alone.

Here is your Amazon link- Cover Me in Darkness by Eileen Rendahl

*I received this book for review from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.