Knox works as a stripper at the exclusive gentlemen’s club The Strip in Las Vegas. When she’s not working she’s out with her friend Dee at various high-end bars and restaurants. Drinking too much. Doing a few too many drugs. Hooking up for one night stands. Knox came to Sin City to escape. To create a new persona and a new life. Now the life she’s built is starting to unravel due to the fact that she’s got into the habit of drugging and robbing some of her high rolling clients. And now one of them has died. Knox thinks nobody will link the death to her. That it will be written off as just something that “happens in Vegas”. But it’s not the first time she’s killed somebody. And it won’t be the last. When Knox picks up the handsome Jett for what she intends to be one night of lust she is surprised to find she is falling in love. More surprised still to find that Jett is an undercover cop investigating the deaths that have occurred at The Strip.
WHAT HAPPENS IN… is billed as a “serial killer thriller”, the first in a series that will feature the Knox character. It’s a brave move to hang a series around a killer and author Steffanie Moyers spends a lot of time building her character’s back story and her motivations for how she’s turned out. The justifications for Knox’s behavior, and her hunting down of awful men, is revealed in a flashback sequence but the actuality of her actions frequently seem more triggered by greed than any notion of revenge, occurring more by opportunity than careful planning. The reader may have an understanding of Knox’s psyche but she is not an entirely sympathetic lead character.
Much of WHAT HAPPENS IN… is well written. Moyers evokes the seediness of Vegas so well that the scents of stale smoke and spilt drinks is almost palpable. The action sequences are good too. Well paced. Explicit. The choreography of violence clear and exciting. The erotic interludes are frequent and effective. There are a few problems though with the structure of the book. A switch in narrator part way through is an experiment that doesn’t quite come off but the main issue is the numerous dialogue scenes that drag on for far too long adding nothing to the characterization and slowing the pace to a crawl. Thrillers need a tight edit and too much of WHAT HAPPENS IN… is superfluous. As Moyers progresses the series it would be hoped she can trim the fat from her prose so it all reads as lean and mean as her character acts.
WHAT HAPPENS IN… introduces the murderous Knox, a high end stripper in an exclusive Las Vegas club in an erotic thriller that is well written but just a little too slow to really thrill.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader