The Briars by Sarah Crouch

Genre: Literary Thriller

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Desperate to escape a relationship gone bad, Annie Heston flees north to accept a job as a game warden in Lake Lumin, a picturesque town in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

A cougar has been spotted in the area, and as Annie warns the community of the threat, she quickly discovers that not everyone in the tight-knit town is welcoming of outsiders, except for Daniel Barela, a reclusive carpenter who lives in the shadow of the mountain. They form an instant bond, though Annie soon comes to realize there is more to his past than meets the eye.

When the body of a young woman is found in the briars that border Daniel’s property, the peace Annie has found in Lake Lumin shatters. As she assists the local sheriff with the investigation, Annie must rely on her wilderness training and intuition to find a murderer hiding in plain sight.

Urgent and emotionally complex, The Briars is a captivating literary thriller that marries an exploration of human nature with a plot as thorny and twisted as the brambles for which it is named.

Review of The Briars

Overall, The Briars felt like two different stories mashed together, and the combination didn’t work for me. The novel started strong with an atmospheric prologue portraying the discovery of a body on a routine hiking trip. Chapter One introduced protagonist Annie Heston. From the opening, I can tell Sarah Crouch has a firm grasp of craft. She employed solid storytelling techniques, like starting with emotional conflict. Annie is fleeing a broken relationship in Chapter One, and her anger, sorrow, and betrayal come through in her interiority and actions.

After the first chapter or so, the pacing slowed considerably and the plot moved away from the mystery promised on the back cover copy. By the last one-third of the book, the pacing tightened again and I found myself turning pages to figure out who the killer was.

Ms. Crouch obviously knows the Pacific Northwest well and captures its beauty, mystery, and brutality in this book. The romance narrative within the mystery felt forced and ultimately ruined the story for me. However, I’m not a fan of romance as a genre (subplot is fine), so that no doubt influenced my opinion here.

Annie and Daniel Were Flat, Unbelievable Characters

Overall, neither Annie nor Daniel Barela (her love interest) came alive on the page for me. Annie was slightly better, but her backstory was pretty cliché (and a little nonsensical). I was convinced she was in her mid-thirties, maybe forties, for a long time – mostly because her husband left her for a “younger woman.” When her age (twenty-eight) was explicitly mentioned, the character lost plausibility in my mind. Men don’t typically leave their wives for younger women when they’re still in their twenties. Sure, it’s not impossible, but it’s highly implausible.

Daniel’s background felt convoluted. He ran away from home at seventeen to escape his abusive stepfather, Gary. The only reason he chose to run rather than carry out his original plan of suicide was because his stepfather just happened to come home right when Daniel was about to electrocute himself in the basement, and Gary assumed the situation was a trap devised to kill him rather than Daniel. Conveniently, Daniel was scheduled to go on a camping trip with his scout troop the next day (and for some reason, no one stopped him from going after allegedly attempting murder).

Once Daniel was in the wilderness, he managed to fake his own death by animal attack. Then he hiked all the way to Lake Lumin and found an abandoned boathouse still intact following a restaurant fire. Conveniently, the land was owned by a family with the surname Barela – which just happened to match the name on the driver’s license Daniel stole from a classmate prior to running away. Daniel assumed the identity of this classmate and made a property claim on the abandoned land. His claim was accepted without much scrutiny. He also managed to find work as a contractor (a trade he learned from his stepfather), which raises questions about how he attained his professional license on a stolen identity.

I acknowledge that all books have a touch of implausibility, and readers accordingly need to suspend their disbelief. I just found the weird coincidences too unbelievable (and too numerous) in this book, especially in regards to Daniel’s backstory.

The Romance Was Shallow and Fast-Tracked

I didn’t care for the romance between Annie and Daniel at all. This subplot basically became the main plot for a good portion of the book, betraying my expectations as a reader. I picked this up for the mystery and thriller elements, but instead got a romance.

The connection between Annie and Daniel felt shallow, with “love at first sight” vibes. Alarmingly, Annie disregarded the fact that Daniel lied to her repeatedly. As a law enforcement official, she should have been more concerned over him admitting to identity theft and property fraud.

In the end, it wasn’t Daniel’s lies and criminal past that separated these two, but rather, a series of misunderstandings. Each was led to believe the other was dating someone else.

Ultimately, it felt like the characters were being maneuvered together and then pulled apart as if they were simply pawns in the plot. I’m a firm believer in driving the plot forward through causality and character motivation, but this felt more like happenstance breaking the two apart.

Pacing and Plausibility Issues

The pacing was far too slow in the beginning and middle of the book. I almost didn’t finish it, but I really wanted to give an honest review of the entire book. The romance contributed to most of the pacing issues. There was also quite a bit of backstory that wasn’t very interesting – again, because I didn’t care about the characters.

All pacing issues aside, what really ruined this book for me were major plausibility issues. I’ve already mentioned how convoluted Daniel’s life seemed. But the primary offender was firearms safety.

Game warden Annie Heston understandably carries a firearm as she is a duly appointed law enforcement official. However, she commits a shocking lapse in judgment. In Chapter 15, Annie is harassed by a gang of unpleasant locals, one of whom inexplicably draws a gun over a mild verbal insult. I can buy that a civilian made a dumb decision. But once Annie disarms her attacker, she fires a warning shot in the air, a gross violation of firearms safety (and illegal in many town ordinances).

Look, I understand that unrealistic things happen in thrillers and mysteries all the time. The issue here is the context of the story world Ms. Crouch has created, and Annie’s role in it. Clearly, the author wants us to take Annie’s job as a game warden seriously. In an interview with Writer’s Digest, she discussed researching that career for The Briars to portray it more accurately. So, when game warden Annie does something that breaks the laws she’s bound to uphold, it’s jarring. She didn’t even have a good reason to do it, which would have alleviated the implausibility factor.

Annie had already disarmed her attacker; there was no need to “intimidate” him by firing a warning shot. She didn’t have reason to believe her life was in danger at that moment. Even more bewildering, she faced zero consequences afterwards. The whole incident took me completely out of the story.

Carla Hoch from FightWrite® has an excellent article on the implications of a character threatening with a weapon. The stakes go up as soon as a weapon comes out. Characters need to be prepared to fight for their lives. Now, I understand the assailant in this case had already escalated it to that point. However, a law enforcement official would be expected to show more trigger discipline.

Rating

I was halfway between 2 stars and 3, so this ultimately gets 2.5 stars. Despite the major issues in the beginning and middle, the ending of the book was very compelling and tense. I genuinely couldn’t put it down until I found out who the killer was.

I understand why Ms. Crouch wanted to develop a romance between Annie and Daniel to create tension later on in the story (I’ll avoid spoilers in this regard). However, their relationship fell completely flat. This would have been a much stronger novel without the forced romance plotline. I picked it up expecting a mystery and was disappointed when I had to wait until the last one-third of the book to get the “promise of the premise,” as Blake Snyder puts it.