The Last Strand by Van Krishna

The Last Strand by Van Krishna
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a really good story. The plot was different and fully of mystery and suspense, and I think it definitely has the potential to be great.

Overall, the characters were good. Nick was well developed and overall a likeable guy, not to mention downright sexy. We were able to get to know him well throughout the story, and I enjoyed the chapters told from his point of view the most. Liz's character was good, and I mostly liked what we saw of her. The one thing that I really did not like about her was her indecisiveness. She would tell Nick one thing, but then do another. Bipolar much? Though, there was some definite chemistry between Liz and Nick, and we love chemistry. Additionally their banter was quite fun. The only character I really did not like was Stacy. She was a horrible friend to Liz, though Liz just laughed it off like it was funny.

While I enjoyed the story, there were a couple of things that I have to mention that brought the rating down from a 4 to a 3 for me. First of all, there were too many grammatical errors not to mention them. One or two errors throughout the book I could overlook, but there were many consistently throughout. They were little things, 'I'm' instead of 'I am' (those two words cannot exclusively be used in place of one another), comma misuse or lack of commas, and semicolon misuse, but as I said it was enough to be noticeable, and that distracted my reading and ultimately detracted from the story. Additionally, the thought processes seemed very disjointed to me, especially in the beginning, to the point where I stopped at one point to check and see if the author was a native English speaker. It wasn't necessarily bad, per se, just…flighty, and I had the constant feeling that I was missing parts of the story. Plus, I kept wondering why everything was in italics? That was a bit distracting. Every page had some random thoughts thrown into italics without any rhyme or reason to it that I could discern.

The second thing that brought the rating down I had mentioned above – Liz's indecisiveness. This inconsistency in her personality was a major character flaw for her. For example, one second she was ignoring Nick and telling him she was 'not that kind of girl,' and the next second (literally) she was half naked with him in the front seat of his car. There was no in-between and no transition from one Liz to the next. In another scene she had not been speaking to him for a few days and the next thing you knew they were having sex like nothing had been wrong. Again like mentioned above, I just felt like something was missing from those scenes, possibly some inner dialogue that explained why she went from one extreme to the next.

Overall, the story was entertaining and could be really great with an editor with an eye for detail.

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