For Good
Karelia Stetz-Waters
Marydale and Kristen have very little in common. One is a convicted murderer, the other a straight up defense attorney. One is a committed lesbian, the other has only dated men of various standards. When their lives collide in a tiny country town ruled by homophobes, it seems like love will never succeed.
Stetz-Waters creates characters that are compliments of each other, particularly in these romances of hers (Something True, Forgive Me if I’ve Told You This Before). I worry that this could become formulaic for her work, but I am reassured by her thrillers (The Admirer, The Purveyor) that she can write in more than one area.
I read this novel while there was a tornado warning for the area I was staying in overseas. Nothing like a storm outside to provide a perfect reading atmosphere. I couldn’t tell you why exactly I kept reading, only that I did and that I couldn’t put it down. Love, love, love.
Lesbian sex scenes written by a lesbian? Yes please for realism and a drive to include value in what could just be lumped into ‘eroticism’. As with other Stetz-Waters novels, sex is for controlling or for submission, not just a titillating inclusion for the reader. I’m not reading the novel for the sex scenes, but I love it all the same.
Money where my mouth is on this one. I received an ebook copy well before it was ‘properly’ released (I can’t even find it on GoodReads), but I’ll be purchasing a paperback copy as soon as one is available. 5 stars from me for another valuable contribution to adult queer novels.
This novel was trying to see itself by other reviewers as a ‘thriller [and] a titillating delight’. Sorry, the sexual tension that Kendra seems to feel towards Lynch isn’t even that tensioned for me as a reader. I saw it, yes, but the gripping storyline was what did it for me.
This novel takes both its name and its conversational writing style In the ‘tradition’ of 
If this novel had been billed as an expose of what it looks like when a family is ripped apart by a disappearance, then maybe I could have gotten into it. Even then, it was too caught up in what Sam felt for anything else to really come through. I never want to be in that position.
As long as you can get past the extreme amounts of explicit swearing in the prologue and first chapter, you’ll be golden for reading this novel. If that sort of thing bothers you, I advise skipping straight ahead. I put the book down and tried to take a nap instead of keeping reading at that point. Anyway, I persevered and it got better from there.
This is the novel of when parenting isn’t smooth sailing. Or perhaps, just parenting in general. It takes a look at how men and women somehow change in the months following their child’s birth, and yet hopefully stay the same.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
This book was actually enjoyable. I was hesitant. As I say though, Reed is from the people angle. After his son’s accident, he’s one of the people who have pushed forward from the ground up to make a difference in politics to change ordinary people’s lives. As a geneticist, this gets into all sorts of ethical ideas and messes, some of which are discussed here.