Body in the Woods does one thing 100% right and that’s realism. It captures what a totally convoluted mess a murder mystery of this type would be. The asshole cops who don’t want the P.I. nosing in on their sorry excuse of an investigation. You have the constant lies from everybody involved. The utter chaos it would bring to the lives of everybody it touches and the rabbit holes that you unintentionally fall into.

At one point, I thought the story was over. The main mystery had been solved. But it just kept going. To be honest, I was over the story at that point. But that just added to the realism. These sort of situations don’t just have some clean finish where everybody goes home happy.

I did have a difficult time following along at times, but I blame that entirely on the audio narration. The narrator did a fine job of reading and acting out the lines. But his characters all sounded exactly the same. So I found it damn near impossible to tell who was talking during conversations that involved several people. I feel like that led to me missing out on vital plot points, though I was, in the end, able to follow along pretty well.

I think if I were to revisit this novel, I would pick up a paperback copy as I’d have a much easier time telling who said what and when.

As for the mystery, I did find myself correctly predicting the culprit. However, there were numerous other twists I wasn’t sure how they fit into the story and was decently surprised by them. I recommend this book because it really felt like I was a fly on the wall in a real investigation and I felt for the characters who had to go through all this nonsense.

NOTE: This copy was provided to me free of charge as a digital review copy. The opinions stated in this review are mine and mine alone, I was not paid or requested to give this book a certain rating, suggestion, or approval. ( )