Book Review: I Ate the Sheriff by James Scott Bell

Goodreads Summary: Justice. It's what's for dinner.

What's worse than killing a cop? Eating him afterwards. Which is exactly what happened to a Los Angeles County sheriff in the office of one noted Los Angeles lawyer. Now Mallory Caine, zombie at law, faces the toughest trial of her life - her own - since she's the prime suspect. Ironically, Mallory's been suppressing her undead desires in a 12-step zombie recovery group. It's her human desires that scare her. He's one hot werewolf named Steve Ravener, and he's Mallory's latest client. His ex-wife wants to keep him from seeing his kids. He needs a lawyer whose bite is worse than his bark. Needless to say, family law has never been this hairy. And with a murder charge hanging over her head, a snake goddess charming her mother, and all kinds of hell-spawn taking over L.A., Mallory's plate is full. And she's dying to take a bite.

Goodreads Rating: 4.13 stars with 8 ratings

Genre listing: Zombie, Legal Thriller

Other reviews on the series: Pay Me in Flesh, The Year of Eating Dangerously

Goodreads Challenge: 26/60 books

2020 Reading Challenge: #39 Book three in a trilogy (find the full challenge here)

Book Review:

*Edit: Apparently, my Grammarly updates aren't taking effect when I make them. Please excuse my dust while I go through and edit hundreds of posts in between work and classes.*

Happy Friday, readers! I hope everyone is doing well, surviving, and maybe actually has fun plans for this weekend. I'm going to try and get another book read before Grad classes start on Wednesday. RIP Me, I think. 

Anyways, on to I ate the Sheriff by James Scott Bell. I'm really not sure where I'm at on this one. I'm trying to dissect my thoughts and not give out too many spoilers, but it's going to be difficult. So, if I spoil things, I'm sorry. I'm also struggling to remember what was part of the other books and what was part of this one. I will say that I got to the halfway point of this book pretty quickly, and a lot of that was because I was enjoying the story. 

In I ate the Sheriff, Mallory finds her self on trial when the beloved Sheriff and his deputy are found dead, and she's arrested. Trial wise, it was on par with the other trials in the series. Mallory goes through some crazy lengths to prove innocence. The trial was really enjoyable. She gets herself a new client, who seems interesting. He's a werewolf, which leads to other werewolves. One of which is Pat Seyjak, sorry spoilers. 

I'm not really all that surprised at who killed the deputy. I think the way the story worked out that was really the only person it could have been. I don't think the other possibilities would have bothered. Once the trial concludes, I feel like the story started to get a bit ridiculous. It somehow went from a legal thriller to a disaster movie towards the end. Aaron becomes a giant thing. There's fires and buildings collapsing, all while someone's having a press conference. 

I don't know if I was just tired, or if the ending just didn't make much sense. It felt like it ended abruptly. There wasn't any real conclusion to the story. Mallory chose her side, some things happen, and then she sped off with the detective to do another thing. I don't have any indication that there's going to be another book. Things that happened in the book also lead me to believe there won't be another book (spoilers and whatnot), but if that's the case, then the ending was incredibly disappointing. Even a short epilogue would have helped tremendously to close the story up. 

I'm struggling because I liked the story up to a point. After that, it just felt like everything was rushed, and words were put down to get the book pushed out. Does 80% of the book I enjoy outweigh the 20% that was seriously disappointing? I don't know. I really hope that there's going to be something, later on, that closes this story up.