1 out of 4 stars
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Shelly's Homecoming is a crime novel by Angela Jenean Alston. Ten years ago, Shelly Foreman's mother died, and her father disappeared from her life. Now she has tracked him down with help from Private Investigator Rubin Mills. As she and her father attempt to repair their strained relationship, Shelly's friend Jean tells her of a haunted store located across the road from Shelly's own fashionable boutique. Here, a woman named Marie Montclair was allegedly once beheaded by her husband-to-be in a room full of dinner guests...
This book has occasional neat character description: "The private eye, Rubin Mills, was dried out like an old prune, tall and thin, with a Southern accent." There was also one particularly striking and beautiful descriptive sentence early in the book: "She saw naked shrubs and bare pine trees swaying in the wind and silhouettes of gray branches sketched up against the rising sun." The plot is fairly intricate, and Alston describes interior rooms and furnishings nicely, along with mouth-watering meals of restaurant-grade food. The cover of the book also impressed me, which was partly why I chose to read it. Unfortunately, these are the only positives I could find in Shelly's Homecoming.
This book badly needs editing. There are plenty of overlong sentences, such as: "Then she opened her car door with a click and slammed the door back hard to make sure that it closed and then made her way up the narrow cement path to her shop." The error count for the book is very high, too, especially for minor punctuation errors. I found ten errors by 6% of the way through the book. A new person speaking often does not start a new paragraph, which is confusing at times. Incorrect words and phrases are also used, such as "stepped foot in" for "set foot in" and "whole in the wall" for "hole-in-the-wall". There are changes of tense from past to present and back again, and at one point, the book switches briefly from the third person to first person narrative and back with no warning and no quotation marks.
Aside from the editing, there are issues with the writing itself. Unusual slang appears during regular descriptive prose, which I found jarring. For example: "...where his rinky-dink offices were located..." and "...he made a jokey-joke..." and "...they skedaddled upstairs..." This might be fitting if written by a viewpoint character who spoke like that, but not from an omniscient narrator. It just didn't feel like professional writing to me.
Some of the dialogue is unrealistic; occasionally, it is nonsensical. "There is a problematical puzzle in front of us and we need to solve it fast and in a hurry," Shelly's father Shelton says at one point. Aside from this sentence being repetitive, how many people would use the words "problematical puzzle" in regular speech? I don't know anyone who talks like that. Similarly, a Physician's Assistant who has just stitched up Shelly's boyfriend Sean says: "This is going to sting for many days, but you are hardcore." I can't envision any nurse telling a patient they are "hardcore". Finally: "I am breaking as a bicycle spoke and they are aware of this fact." Even in context, I had no idea exactly what this sentence was trying to convey.
Other inconsistencies throughout the narrative include people "hollering" or "screaming" at each other during a clandestine (and illegal) visit to Shelly's shop during the early hours of the morning. At another point, Shelly tells her father to "get back to your sexy dream!" about an erotic dream he woke from while sleeping on her couch. This is not the sort of thing I think a daughter would say to her father - or even want to know about, for that matter! Shelly's father Shelton also seems overly excited about the mine under her shop: "We are sitting on top of an active mine and are going to be filthy rich," when he is already worth over six million dollars. There were plenty of other examples of inconsistent character behaviour, or characters changing their minds or moods instantly without enough motivation.
I wrestled with my rating for Shelly's Homecoming all the way through, but given its myriad deficiencies, I cannot rate it higher than 1 out of 4 stars. It needs both a solid edit and a comprehensive rewrite to fix the inconsistencies I mentioned. With its issues fixed, I would recommend it to readers of crime, but since I struggled to finish it, in its current state, I cannot recommend it to anyone.
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Shelly's Homecoming
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(I've been guilty of that too though but I don't think I've ended up with as bad an experience as yours) 
