I’ve always been a big reader, even since I was a child. I’d come downstairs for breakfast and sit over the floor vent  keeping warm and reading until breakfast was ready. So when I heard about Booksneeze, Thomas Nelson’s program to get bloggers to review books — and we get to keep the books — it was a natural.

Face of Betrayal was written by Lis Wiehl with April Henry. The “with” part is a code phrase that usually means Lis had the ideas (and may have roughed out a first draft or an outline) that the ghost writer (April) polished into final form. When the ghost writer gets cover credits, that also usually means they traded their name on the cover for less money to write the book. Ghost writer options give you even less money for writing if you choose and instead of with.

Lis Wiehl is a former attorney and a legal correspondent for Fox News. The back cover and frontispiece are covered with praise statements for the book, calling it a blast, thrilling, gripping, fast paced, and just about everything else you might imagine. Most were from colleagues at Fox, so I had misgivings even before I opened to the first page. One even referred to it as one of the ten best of 2009 (Suspense magazine). It was looking bad.

The lead characters are three women, former high school friends who have reconnected now that they have reached their thirties. Though they seem to have next to nothing in common, they have rebonded and refer to themselves as the Triple Threat, the name of a chocolate dessert they love.

One is a married DA, one a blonde, single TV reporter at a local Portland (Oregon) station, and the third a black single mother and FBI agent. The first glimpse of one of them that we get gives you more detail on what she is wearing than a feel for her as a person. I was starting to wonder if I’d fallen into a chick lit morass.

It’s actually not bad as a story concept. A young Senate page, Katie Converse, has disappeared while back in Portland for Christmas. Since there’s no body yet, there are very few clues As the reporter covers the story of the disappearance and the FBI agent tries to follow what few clues there are, slowly but surely the three all become involved in the case.

But it’s not fast-paced. We’re well past halfway into the book before there are any clues beyond Katie’s MySpace blog posts, and only then because a coyote is seen in the park with the young girl’s hand. From that point on, the clues come fast and furious.

Reading this was a mixed bag. The characters aren’t as richly developed as they should be to let you emphathize with them – they’re two-dimensional. And the story line is transparent. The plusses are that the lead characters are atypical role models, career-oriented women facing what life throws at them – things like pregnancy, abuse (not the same woman) and conflicts from their work environments.

There are chunks of the plot you can see coming for miles – if you haven’t guessed that the Senator is a dirty old man who takes advantage of seventeen year-old girls, probably got her pregnant (and arranged for an abortion), then you’re not in tune with your inner stereotypical characters. Why, yes, he is pro-choice. Did you really need to ask?

He’s also so totally obvious as a suspect that you also know it’s also too contrived for him to be the murderer and you’re thrown back into no suspects in sight. Fortunately, that’s when our heroines discover the homeless Vietnam vet and his young daughter who built himself a shack in the woods coincidentally right in sight of the murder scene. Naturally, neither one saw anything.

And there are a few WTF instances as well. When the news crew is getting trained on how makeup has to change for the advent of HD TV, our reporter’s first thought is of how Richard Nixon would never have lost the debates with Kennedy if his makeup had been that good. Yep. She instantly thinks of something that happened twenty years before she was born. Amazing, and unbelievable, totally unbelievable, unless you’re a Fox News reporter. Even then it still wins the Moment of Total WTF award.

So how do they figure it out? Someone who works at a battered women’s shelter violates their rules of confidentiality to let the truth slip. Long ago, I worked for an agency that funded places like that. The people I knew would have never broken that confidentiality. Never.

Would I have picked this off the shelf at Borders or BaM and paid $16 – or recommend you do? No, not really. But if you find it at a second-hand bookstore and need something to read on the beach, pick it up. (Or email me and I’ll send you this one or volunteer for Booksnooze and get your own.) You won’t thank me, but you won’t curse me either. Well, not for that anyway.