Premonition: A Cotton Lee Penn Historical Mystery

 

Premonition: A Cotton Lee Penn Historical Mystery by Tower Lowe   324 pages

I read the first book in the Cotton Lee Penn historical mysteries back in 2015. I enjoyed it a lot. I especially like the character Cotton Lee who suffered from polio and people who thought she couldn’t do anything with a limp other than sit at home and stare at the wall.

Cotton has returned with a new case. Like before, author Lowe uses dueling timelines. This time the periods are 1864-1885 to 1972 and involve some rare gold coins from the Civil War era.

The story opens with the mysterious death of Anselm Bannon.  He was out deer hunting when he was hit by a bullet. Was it a stray or did someone have in it for him? 

Although this novel has a good story, its execution is awful. Author Lowe didn’t remind readers of who many characters were and how they intersected with each other. For example, going back to my review of the first book, I had noted that Max Mayfield was a lawyer who often hired Cotton Lee to help him with his investigations. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to go back and read that first review until I had finished this new work. I was lost with most of the characters, trying to figure out who was who and why they were involved in the story.

Besides not reminding readers of existing characters’ background, there are numerous errors in the book. There are missing words, wrong names, run on or fragmented sentences that don’t work. And it was convoluted…I felt the story was going in circles.

But like I said, the mystery of the gold coins was quite interesting. It fired my imagination in ways not connected to this work. The most frustrating part of the book was that after 324 pages, I’m not sure who killed Anselm Bannon or the origins of the gold coins.

Normally I would give “Premonition: A Cotton Lee Penn Historical Mystery” 1 out of 5 star, but since the gold coins did strike an interest that kept me reading the entire work, I give “Premonition: A Cotton Lee Penn Historical Mystery”2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.