Orchids and Stones should have been an outstanding mystery. It has a great story premise, a wonderful message and characters that could easily have been believable.
The story centers around Daphne Mayfield whose sister, Suzanne, was murdered twenty years earlier. Ten years later, when the detective assigned to her sister’s case retires, her father gives up hope of ever finding his daughter’s killer and commits suicide.
Having lost her sister and father, Daphne quits college, joins the construction trades and becomes a roofer. She also meets and moves in with Vic and his two kids; much to the displeasure of Vic’s ex-wife.
While sitting in a park, bemoaning the ten thousand issues she’s trying to deal with, an older woman pleads with her for help, saying that the man and woman with her are kidnapping her and stealing everything she owns. Daphne follows them and tries to convince herself, and others, that the older woman is, in fact, being kidnapped and robbed.
Interlaced with her desire to help is her, and her fathers, belief that someone had to have seen what happened to her sister and if they had only spoken up, they would have found her sister’s killer. Thus, she becomes obsessed with helping the little old lady.
About half way through the book, I was hooked on the plot and fascinated by Daphne. However, I also almost quite reading because she kept going off on head trips that lasted page after page. Page after page of questioning what she could have done to prevent her sister’s and father’s deaths. The first, second and, even the third time, I sympathized with her. Then it got old. Suddenly, her character stopped being real, as the author completely overdid it.
As if that were not enough, Daphne then combines the issues with the boyfriend’s ex-wife and kids with her guilt over the deaths and, in several scenes, slips totally out of character to become a basket case. As she goes in one direction, Vic the boyfriend, goes in another and instead of helping her work through things, he develops the patients of a saint and just stands there.
By the end of the book, the actions of the main characters, and support characters, no longer fit the images the author had tried to build and the plot twists started to go sideways.
The most discouraging thing is; this book could easily have been outstanding. The plot was good, the characters relatable the twists and turns kept you guessing. Unfortunately, all of that was overwhelmed by the author totally over playing the sympathy card and making her characters unpredictable, hard to follow and eventually, hard to believe.
Recommendation: An okay read that’s hard to get through and characters that become hard to believe.