Book Review: Cold Winter Rain by Steven P. Gregory

Cold Winter Rain

By Steven P Gregory

Publisher: Oak Mountain Press, LLC

Published: November 10, 2013

ISBN: 0985992816

Amazon Synopsis:

Slate, a recovering lawyer who lost his family to an accident, lives on a sailboat, owns a beach bar, and occasionally helps clients recover things they have lost. Children, for example. Kris Kramer, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Birmingham lawyer, Don Kramer, has been missing for two days when her father visits Slate in his beach bar, which isn’t very busy on a raw day in January. Kramer engages Slate to try to find Kris. But 

two days after Slate arrives in Birmingham, Leon Grubbs, captain of the Homicide Division of the Birmingham Police Department, calls Slate just after midnight. A murder victim lies across the railroad tracks in the no-man’s-land between North and South Birmingham, Slate’s business card in the pocket of his business suit.

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My Thoughts:

Slate gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to take on a missing persons case for a fellow lawyer in Birmingham. While recovering from the loss of his family due to an accident, he becomes involved with a new love interest. His client ends up dead and then things really get kind of crazy.

While Steven Gregory has an interesting storyline and a variety of unexpected twists in his plot, his writing was not able to keep my attention I found it difficult to keep reading at times. The portions of the story that were interesting, were quite engaging and that is what kept me reading to the end of the novel.

I did like the character Slate. I thought he was an interesting character and I empathized with him about the loss of his family. The author had me invested in him and I truly felt good that he was able to reach out to Kris’ soccer coach in a new relationship and hurting for him again when things didn’t turn out.

I found the ending quite weak. While there was a happy ending to Kris’ kidnapping, I thought it was a weak way for the it to have been resolved. As well, I thought the individual that perpetrated the kidnapping and the reason for it (I won’t say here what it was, so as not to spoil things for those who have not yet read the book) was not realistic. After I read the book, I researched the condition on the internet and the way that the condition was used in the book was not the way the condition usually presents itself in real situations.

For these reasons, I can only give this book 2 stars.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. I was not required to provide a positive opinion. All thoughts are my own.

About the Author:

Steven Gregory was born in a cotton-mill town in north Georgia. His parents moved to the family farm when he was nine. Steve earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama in the early 1980s. After that he worked as a stockbroker for a few years, then earned a J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law and practiced law for more than twenty years. As a lawyer, Steve defended a couple of clients facing capital murder charges. He finds writing about murder much less stressful.  You can read Steve's flash fiction story "Legal Mail" now in Out of the Gutter magazine: http://www.outofthegutteronline.com/2013/10/legal-mail.html

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