Quarry

Quarry by Susan Cummins Miller

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"With crimes of passion striking the quiet University of Del Rio campus, geologist Frankie MacFarlane is enmeshed in the case of a fragile psyche pushed to the edge ...
"Just as Frankie arranges her doctoral dissertation's long-awaited defense, a police investigation has reopened -- alongside unhealed wounds. When her ex-fiance Geoff Travers vanished, expelled by the university for plagiarizing Frankie's research, she should've deduced that his remains -- found later in the desert -- couldn't be legit, either.

"Now an unknown assailant is preying on high-profile geologists. Two members of her dissertation defense board have been attacked, one of them fatally. A fellow student has been abducted from her fieldwork site and, trapped amid the volcanic mesas of the Cady Mountains, has little time left. As Frankie sorts clues, she'll need to keep perspective -- or she'll swiftly become a psychopath's latest quarry."

~~back cover

I thought I would like this book more. It has lots of elements I like: university life, being a graduate student, being a graduate geology student (which in many ways is like being an archaeology graduate student), field work, a mystery, etc. Unfortunately, the plot revolves around a psychopath and trying to figure out what he will do next. And why. Not my cup of tea.


The book is very well written. The plot is clever and excellent for its genre. The characters are believable and interesting. Frankie, our hero, is not a lovely woman thrown into harm's way, who doesn't quite know what to do about it except plunge ahead into very predictable danger. She's a competent, self-assured young woman who is independent and quite used to solving problems and taking care of herself.

I wish I could give this book more stars. It deserves more stars. It's just that I'm not a fan of the psychopathic murder genre. If you are, you'll probably love this book.