No Rest for the Wicked by Rachel Louise Adams

LA pathologist, Dolores Diaz (born Hawthorne), gets a call from the FBI informing her that her father, a former mayor and US Senator, has been kidnapped. They ask her to return to Little Horton, Wisconsin, to assist in the investigation. Dolores fled Little Horton 18 years earlier and hasn't been back since. Bad memories, trauma, an ex-boyfriend, and a stepmother she doesn't care for number among the reasons she has never returned.

Little Horton is famous for two things: its Halloween celebration and unfortunate deaths around Halloween stretching back a hundred years or more. Dolores is hoping her father will quickly be found, but instead, more deaths follow, as well as ties to mysteries from close to the time she originally fled.

The setting and the central crime in this book show a lot of promise. It never really delivers on that promise. Starting with the premise that the FBI would ask someone to fly from LA to Wisconsin to interview them rather than send agents from the LA office to talk to them, federal and local law enforcement consistently behaved unbelievably. Only two agents are assigned to the kidnapping of a former US Senator, and one of them only has experience in financial crime. The pacing was slow throughout, with no real progress being made until the last few pages. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, including Dolores, whose calming mechanism is counting the bones of the head, of which there are apparently only three. Neither the family dynamics nor the small-town dynamics felt authentic. While the ending packed some excitement and pace that was missing from the rest of the book, the events that followed the Scooby Doo unveiling (which was actually far less surprising than an actual Scooby Doo villain) also lacked credibility. 

The narration of the book by Jeremy Carlisle Parker was adequate but lacking in many ways. The writing was paced slowly, but her narration did nothing to help it move more quickly. The female voices all sounded the same, as did all the male voices, except for one or two accents. 

Great cover and interesting setting that ultimately fails to deliver any real scares or thrills.

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher.