** spoiler alert ** 
 Cryer's Cross is a perplexing book. It's incredibly well-written, suspenseful, involving, and even rather moving at times. The characters are fleshed-out, interesting, sympathetic, and not unlike people you'd know or be friends with in everyday life. And yet it suffers from two incredibly distracting flaws: 
 1. It isn't quite sure what it wants to be, and 
 2. It's about a killer desk 
 There. I said it. I realize I've just totally ruined it for those of you who haven't read it yet, but you know what? You deserve to know, because how much you'll enjoy Cryer's Cross depends on exactly how much that single fact will bother you. 
 (And also, you learn this about halfway through the book - and the summary really hints at it, doesn't it? - so it isn't quite the book-ruining information you'd expect.) 
 Cryer's Cross suffers mightily from Stephen King Syndrome, meaning it's very well-written, has an incredibly interesting story and well-developed characters, and a really stupid monster. In fact, I'd actually call it Stephen King Lite - and that's not in a derisive or snide way. One of my biggest issue with King is that he takes forever to get to the point. McMann doesn't - her writing is focused, sharp, and clear, and where it takes me days, sometimes weeks, to get through King stories (most of the time yelling in my head "GET ON WITH IT!"), I blew through Cryer's Cross in about three hours without ever wanting to stop. 
 Read more at You're Killing.Us.