I keep giving Sarah Pekkanen a try. She’s a local author and I want to like her books. I have been reading Skipping a Beat for months in fits and starts, but better books keep getting in the way. It’s not that I don’t like the stories, but the characters are always flat. I never really care about them and I end up being annoyed that I stuck with them as long as I did. I have the same love/hate relationship with Anita Shreve (my college roommate will agree with this one). I inevitably think I am going to like Anita Shreve’s books (and I always love her covers), but they always, always fall short. Things You Won’t Say was completely the same way for me. The premise was interesting (depressed cop whose partner was shot then kills an unarmed teenager), but I just wanted to get through it to find out what happened and I basically speed-read it (I don’t think that’s actually a correctly-used phrase) because it was due back at the library before we left for vacation. While I did enjoy the book from about pages 250 to the end, that was because the story moved along at a good clip. However, I wouldn’t bother with this one unless you really like her writing already.