The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark

​Before I lost most of my tolerance for the ubiquitous lady thrillers, I read the author's Last Flight and thought it was pretty good. So I figured I'd see what she's up to now with her latest. 
The main draw here for me, actually, was that I very much enjoy books about writers. This one has two, a father and a daughter, once estranged and now reunited for their first and last project together.
The father has made a career of writing scary stories and is now losing his mind to dementia.
The daughter has made a career of ghostwriting other people's stories before losing it all to a very public feud with a nasty and litigious man in her field. (Attention - message! Because, of course, you can't have a book without a message these days.)

The father has spent fifty years living under a dark shadow of a double murder (both his siblings) of which he has been suspected but never convicted. Now he decides to set the record straight once and for all through a memoir. And who better to write it than the daughter who has spent most of her adult life telling people he's dead.

That's the basic premise of the story, and it is a pretty compelling read ... until you realize that literally all of the mystery and suspense here is based solely of the distribution of information. As in, the reader is strategically fed only a tidbit of info at a time. Which a. gets frustrating, and b. after a while just seems stupid. I mean, the character doesn't go talk to a crucial part of the puzzle person until the last fifth so of the novel. 
It's like, come on. I know you're getting paid per word here, and you've got to hit your 368 pages, or the reader apparently won't recognize what they are reading, but still ...

In the end, this is still very much a genre cliche, meant to check all the right boxes. And as such, it cannot be too challenging, lest it alienates the mainstream audience, thus alienating the more demanding one.
User mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.