Book Review: Painting with Fire
Painting with Fire. K.B. Jensen. Crimson Cloud Media LLC, 2013, Paperback and Kindle, 201 pages.
Reviewed byMary-Megan Kalvig.
Painting with Fire is the debut novel of K.B. Jensen. Besides being an author, she is also a journalist, reporting mainly about crime in the Chicago suburbs, an experience that most likely helped Jensen write this novel about a woman seeking the truth about a crime.
The novel starts out with a murder and its grisly discovery. Claudia, the woman who discovered the body buried in the snow outside her apartment building, becomes obsessed with figuring out who did it after months of no news. Since she is currently unemployed, she has plenty of time to dwell on the murder and to start suspecting her neighbors, including her roommate Tom. It doesn’t help matters that Tom is a secretive man with a criminal record, but, with a friendship on the line, Claudia doesn’t know what to think of her roommate.
Before long, the stories of her neighbors take shape, and the mysterious death of a stranger starts to get more complicated than Claudia could ever imagine.
Jensen does a good job of getting into the head of someone with too much time on her hands. While it initially seemed odd that Claudia didn’t get obsessed with the murder until months had passed, it added an element of authenticity that not all murders are solved in the first few days. That issue aside, Claudia has nothing better to do with her time, aside from applying for jobs, so she starts getting to know her neighbors. There’s a nice assortment of residents in her building, such as the couple that’s constantly arguing, the old lady shut-in, the lonely man whose wife left him, a religious do-gooder, and a single mother with a teenaged son. Almost all of them are quickly addressed and dismissed as suspects, which leaves the characters somewhat flat and unmemorable. Still, it felt like an accurate representation of how little we sometimes know or care about our neighbors.
This novel tries to mingle love and suspense, which is something I generally love and look forward to in mysteries, but, like the secondary characters, the romance falls a little flat. Maybe I’ve read too many romances, but I didn’t feel any spark between Claudia and Tom. At times it seemed a little bit like they were roommates of the opposite sex, each was attractive and supportive of the other, so why not take it to the next level? There wasn’t the build-up or chemistry that had me wondering when they would make the next leap in their relationship. Also, Tom has the habit of coming off as a moody artist – keeping his room locked and throwing a hissy fit if Claudia asks him about his past. While his support of Claudia is admirable, I wished he would tone it down a bit with his need to keep secrets. His behavior had the ability to make him unattractive and undesirable, at least for the reader, but it didn’t seem to bother Claudia. Plus it seemed like a forced way to make him appear suspicious for Claudia’s investigation.
As for the suspense and mystery, this novel wasn’t the roller coaster ride of ups and downs that I expected. The pace definitely picked up come the end, but the beginning was sluggish. Given the fact that this was an amateur sleuth and there was a lack of police development, the slow pace felt truthful to the painstaking procedures of a case growing cold after a number of months. A level of realism is always nice in a novel, but a little more excitement and pace is necessary to keep the reader engaged.
In the end, I’m left feeling “meh” about the book. By no means was this the worst book that I’ve read, but I’m not over the moon about it. For me, something was missing. Then again, all of the reviews I’ve seen online rave about this book. It just goes to show that every book has its ideal reader. Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t me.