A Killing on the Hill by Robert Dugoni is a tale of greed, secrets, jealousy and murder set in the Seattle’s Prohibition era of the 1930s. Truth be told, I found the story to be completely average. Average enough, you could draw a line straight down the middle. There wasn’t really anything inherently breathtaking with the story overall, but nor was there really anything that really drags it down. And yet, the author made it work due to his writing expertise and experience in the game. He’s got a lot of books under his belt.

As a courtroom drama, the author proves he knows his stuff. But once again, while it gets the job done, I didn’t feel exactly excited or thrilled from the experience. Bland characters are likely to blame. One of the main villain on trial, Miller, plays it too cool of a cat to make readers either resent his character or wanting to see him put away for good. You know, the kind of shady characters that just makes your blood boil knowing that they might be able to get away with the crimes they’ve committed. Then we got William Schumacher. A naive teenager whose luck puts him as the main reporter covering the “Trial of the Century”. As straight of a shooter as William is, it’s hard to phantom him doing really, anything, out of the ordinary to create some drama just to spice things up a bit.

One thing I did notice is how there were hardly any good quotes to highlight through the book. William is extremely young, so I guess it would be a bit weird if the author made him spit out words of wisdom beyond his years. However, that excuse can’t be afforded to the other characters in the story, so it was a bit disappointing nonetheless. All in all, A Killing on the Hill was an okay, if not slightly underwhelming, read.