I was unable to finish this.
I found the plot to slow and the characters lacked depth.
This was not for me.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, A. K. Smith, and Wild Rose Press, Inc in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.

A Deep Think is an intricate dance of cause and effect, the mystery surrounding the Cenotes in Belize and Mexico, and the concept of family love. It does not read like a first novel - A. K. Smith does a really good job of catching and holding our attention with this fast paced tale of daring do. I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a good mystery with a little romance tossed in. After you have finished this novel, I recommend that you find and view a short IMAX film titled MacGillivray Freeman's Journey into Amazing Caves. It can take you there.

Oh dear. This book smacks of, “I’ve just done/read about/seen something that I thought was amazing and I want to talk about it to the world, now how can I make all this into a story?” Reading this book felt like I’d been buttonholed at a cocktail party by someone who had just been to the Mexican cenotes and who insisted on telling me all about it. For hours. And failed to notice me yawning and glancing at my watch.

I really struggled to get through this novel. The storyline is a cross between a Mills&Boon and a 60's episode of Star Trek. The characters are one-dimensional and clichéd, with the 'heroine' having only two ways of reacting to anything she experiences: it either hits her "like a punch to the gut" or makes her cry (although this does vary - sometimes she's holding back the tears, sometimes she's letting the tears run down her face).

On a personal note - I don’t like animals in books being used as props and then discarded. Much is made about how much the protagonist loves her dog, Harvey, and how incredibly close she is to him, and of how he still grieves for his other missing owner (her husband), and how that knowledge breaks her heart. Yet, when it suits the storyline, she hastily abandons the young dog to her eighty year old neighbour, without even the slightest consideration of what will become of him once he outlives the old woman.

Not that other characters fare much better – a budding romance begins to blossom but then becomes most inconvenient (with the return of the husband), so is killed off. Literally. And for someone who can cry at the drop of a hat and is very fond of a gentle hand being placed on her shoulder, neither of these two events seem to overly trouble her.

The writing itself could be more engaging if more care was taken. When the story is engrossing or exciting I can ignore the odd error. But when the pace runs like treacle they become more absorbing than the narrative, and this book was littered with grammatical errors and missing punctuation. For example:

"She wanted to throw her phone across the room, but thought of camera's, she hit play on her iPod, put down her phone, picked up Harvey's leash, and went out for a walk."
It took me a third read of this sentence to make any sense of it. Apart from the terrible phrasing, there is no apostrophe in the plural form of camera.

"Conrad silent a few seconds longer nodded."
The book is plagued with similar sentences. Even with the missing punctuation added it's very poor syntax.

The only positive thing I can say about this book is that the cover artwork is beautiful. I won’t be publishing this review anywhere as I feel it unfair to publically rubbish someone’s work.