Great! I really enjoyed it. I loved the way you started us off wondering what it was all about, and then fed us titbits of information as you also raised more questions. You kept the tension going magnificantly, until towards the end of the bit that was in italics. I felt it levelled off at that point, and found myself then skiiping through to the end. So perhaps either you should introduce more questions there, to keep raising the tension, or else end it a little earlier.
I noticed there were also a fair number of typos and slips. I will only list the first two here:
"all for the sake of child whose blood is on my hands" should be "all for the sake of a child whose blood is on my hands"
"had it not be me who watched her dying breath" should be "had it not been me who watched her dying breath"
These can of course easily be fixed by reading it aloud.
Despite these minor slips, I enjoyed it - it's worth polishing off.
I love the way you write! I found this captivating and delightful. I particularly like your little twists like: "his smile only had two settings: smug or cruel."
You write dialogue well, although the characters voices seem a little unnatural and wooden at times, or is this a deliberate effect to recreate a Jane Austen-like atmosphere? If so, well done!
The other thing is that the ending is a bit predictable and not very exciting. I would have preferred a twist at the end.
A few minor suggestions:
"at a very prestigious school". Does "very" add anything? I notice you use it in a couple of other places, and you sometimes qualify verbs when they don't need qualifying. I think your writing would be crisper and more readable if these were removed. Try examining every adjective and adverb in turn and asking if they really need to be there.
The last line of para 4 has a missing "his": "offered no intimations of wife’s welfare".
Further down you use "leisurely" as an adverb ("they began to stroll leisurely around the water"). In British English this would be incorrect (it's always an adjective), but perhaps it's OK in American English - you might like to check.
One paragraph uses "he" in a confusing way. You might like to restructure it so it is clear which "he"'s refer to the doctor and which to Mr. Bickerstaff: "What Mr. Bickerstaff did next he would never forget. On Mary’s wall there was a crucifix, and he turned and knelt before, it rapidly whispering some kind of desperate prayer and rocking back and forth on his knees like a mad man." The context eventually makes it clear, but the initial ambiguity makes the reader pause and re-read it, disturbing the flow.
Wonderful! You really got me going there. Beautifully paced, nicely crafted. I have two suggestions:
1) The only bit that didn't seem realistic was when Katie knew that the bullet would have killed Cole. Would the police really have figured that out in 72 hours, when there wasn't even a murder? My guess is that they wouldn't even have bothered plotting the trajectory, and that no-one would be the wiser.
2) It was a fantastic start, but rather a wimpy ending. You could delete that last paragraph that explains to the reader rather laboriously what the reader already knows. It's like over-explaining a joke - it makes it un-funny. I'd try for a punchier ending.
You have some interesting ideas, but I'm afraid it wouldn't have held my attention for much longer. I'm not left wondering (at any point) what happens next. Instead I feel that you have handed me a series of events, without much tension to connect them.
You tend to be a little long-winded, which breaks what would otherwise be a riveting narrative flow, and you tend to use rather a lot of negatives ("he wanted nothing more than...") when a terser positive would be more punchy. If you could make it a bit shorter and punchier, eliminate superfluous adjectives, etc, I think it would be better.
You may also like to pay some attention to tenses, which tend to jump around a bit. E.g. "Since the war 10 years ago, this was..." grates on me rather. After "since", I would use "..had..". And in the previous sentence you use present tense in the same context.
I also notice a few typos ("in" instead of "on"), words left out, etc. Reading it aloud would fix most of these.
Hope this is helpful. Best of luck!
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