Reviewed: “The Outcasts” by Kathleen Kent

I am so sad that I finished this book.

I want it to keep going and going.

I won it in a Goodreads FirstReads giveaway and the moment I pulled it out of the envelope, I knew I’d like the book. So kudos first to whoever designed one of the best book covers I’ve seen in a very long time.

More kudos to Kathleen Kent for the interesting, intriguing, and excellent plot she created in this book.

The main characters, Lucinda and Nate, don’t even meet until the last fifty pages or so and while that may seem odd, it’s absolutely perfect. It’s like I got to read two different books at once, and both books were incredibly good.

Nate’s the do-gooder, the by-the-book character who is forced to step outside his comfort zone when he realizes that you can’t always do good by the book. As a Texas State Police officer, it’s a hard to thing to comprehend for him.

Lucinda is the bad girl who throws the book in the Louisiana bayous whenever she can, even when she seems to want nothing more than to be able to do good, by the book. As a prostitute who falls in with a killer of prostitutes, because he’s the only man who doesn’t see her seizure disorder as something to run screaming from or commit her to an asylum for.

The minor characters are fascinating too. Captain Deerling and Dr. Tom are the “do-gooder” Texas Rangers who have their own motivations for doing what they do, motivations that sometimes seem to let their morals slip. The Grants and the Wallers play very minor roles but they are written in such a way that you can’t help but feel passionately for them, one way or the other.

I’m going to read this book over and over again, because I read it so fast (because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next) that I’m sure I missed little things. And I’m going to tell whoever will listen to read it.

(This is my own review from Goodreads, copied by me word-for-word.)