I believe I read about a book a day, on good days...that's because I (a) read all kinds of genres and (b) if a book 'grabs' me, I charge through, happily reading for hours until it's done. Woodbury's A Dead End in Vegas falls in a genre I read a lot - mystery/detective/thriller - but it doesn't neatly fit into any category.

The premise seems simple at first; Dave is about to go to the airport to pick up his wife, who has been in Phoenix for a week at a teachers' conference, when he gets the phone call: it's the Las Vegas police - and she's been found dead in a casino hotel room. As Dave comes to find out about his wife's secret life, her passion for an Internet stranger, and the illusions of his own world, he becomes increasingly involved in a hunt that comes full-circle to probe his family, friendships and psyche.

Now, if you're expecting a light 'whodunnit' type of mystery filled with entertaining twists, then A Dead End in Vegas might not be your cup of tea. Its intent is to wind emotional impact and high drama into its saga and it packs this into chapters steeped in tones of inevitability and despair as readers learn just how deeply poor decisions affect every life involved.

As seems inevitable with all good reads, the ending arrives all too soon. It feels abrupt: like the reader's been led down a garden path of complexity only to have everything snap to logical attention within a few short chapters. But that can be said of many a good book where readers might wish for as long and drawn-out an ending as in the rest of the book. Sometimes it's just hard to say 'goodbye'.