Bodies: Book 1 Staged Fright by Sameer Ketkar

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to say about this book, so I went back to Amazon and reread the book description. This story is supposed to be "a quirky new murder-mystery series that's equal parts HBO's "Big Love" and "NCIS."" As a descriptive statement, I was intrigued enough to want to read this book. I've watched several episodes of "NCIS" and have a good grasp of the show's premise. On the other hand, I've never seen "Big Love."

The story is told by Neil Callahan, the youngest son of Tigh and Larkin Callahan. Their other two children are Jack and Rachel. The family lives in Atlanta, Georgia where both parents work for the CDC heading up the Crisis Response Team. He begins by telling us that his parents became involved in a three-way relationship with Special Agent Corban Banks when Neil was fourteen. Banks works for D.H.S. as a member of the Bioterror Task Force.

There are multiple story lines here that don't really pull together into a cohesive whole. At the beginning of the book, I'm reading a story about how Neil's parents came to be involved with Special Agent Banks. To tell us this story, Neil talks about a famous actress involved in her own three-way (oh, maybe that's where his folks came up with the idea) until a body falls through the wall of the hotel room putting a end to that. Boils on the body burst and spray green pus everywhere taking the story into the murder/mystery genre, though I'm still confused as to how this will turn into a love story. This event brings in the CDC (Neil's parents), and Homeland Security (Special Agent Banks). Now people are trying to determine what caused the boils on the corpse.

The story gives us no clue as to Neil's current age as he relates this story to us; I'm not sure that's even relevant. The addition of a third person in his parent's marriage doesn't feel as though this was the main plot. In fact, I struggle to determine what is the main plot of this story. There is a lot of descriptive narrative I felt really served no purpose in the story other than as filler. There is an abundance of technical terms and acronyms (that are not always defined) that as a lay person, add to my confusion.

I'm sorry to say, the story didn't really take off and grab my interest until the last twenty pages. There were no grammatical or spelling errors that came to my notice while reading. The author has several good ideas for more than one story. Perhaps streamlining the current one would have made a better reading experience for me. I saw potential in what was written, however, I don't feel that potential was brought to fruition.

I was gifted a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. 2 stars

This book is available at Amazon. This is a worldwide link that will automatically redirect you to your local Amazon.