Frost: A Novel by Sam Neumann

Reviewer: Sasha Amy Frost has reached rock bottom. She knows that this is rock bottom. She’s a thirty-one-year-old single woman who is back, living in her childhood home with her mother while working a minimum wage job at a local diner. Her world is fueled by her all-consuming desire to drink her pain and sorrow away. Amy navigates her life through stages of drunkenness; how drunk she is, determines how good she’s feeling. Her life was going nowhere good fast. That is until Arnold Dooley, famous for possibly murdering his wife, enters her life and takes it upside down. The weirdest behavior that he exhibits thought? Asking her to sit down and talk with him for a minute. Suddenly, Amy finds herself mixed in with the same people that might be connected to Arnold wife’s murder. Unable to let this go and desperate to now prove that Arnold is not the killer that he has been portrayed to be, Amy allows herself to be pulled deeper and deeper into this crazy, confusing mafia-like world. She soon finds that she is in over her head. This novel is a slow burn that has the reader questioning if all of the background and build up was necessary to the plot line. Much of Amy’s life leading up to her current situation is given and allows for the reader to understand that character more, but overall the plot felt a bit bland. That is, until the last chapters when it began to incorporate the mafia/murder group. Here, the story took off for me. As the reader, I wanted to get more from this story. The end captured my attention and was the most intriguing part of the whole book. The beginning and middle really dragged for me and didn’t provide any content with much of a draw. The novel would have excelled if it brought more elements from a thriller/mystery into the book sooner. It would have raised the stakes for all of the characters. I wanted there to be more risk interwoven throughout the narrative, and think that it would have kept the reader more intrigued. **ARC received in exchange for an honest review. **

Release Date: November 1st 2018

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