Teaser Tuesday: The Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Ambrosia of The Purple Booker.
To play along just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro.

The Case for Jamie –
Katherine Tegen Books

Only follow the rules that are reasonable.
The issue with this axiom is that very few rules are reasonable when examined closely.
— Chapter 2

I was seventeen years old. I was dating-or-not-dating another girl who was right now questioning the campus dealer about a crime I hadn’t committed, and I was in love with my best friend, who I hadn’t seen for a year but who lived on in my day-to-day like a splinter in my goddamn heart.
— Chapter 17

You know how some readers complain that they have to wait a whole year between books in a series while the time going by in books is not nearly as long? I won’t go into the other complaint how authors dare to take this long to write the next book, because … let’s just say that wouldn’t end well. Apart from the fact that a) in most cases it’s not up to the author at all when their book is published and b) have these complainers ever written anything of quality that has more than 60k words that needs to be checked for continuity, accuracy, and a whole bunch of other things? Right, zipping it for now. Just know that when I complain about waiting, I’m not out to blame anyone but want to appreciate the writing of the present book. And I’ll also try to do it in a more constructive way in the future. I might be compelled to write a little more about the process and thoughts on quality at some point though. End of PSA.
For now back to my favourite detective descendants Jamie and Charlotte. Or Jamie. And Charlotte. Because at the start of the book they haven’t seen each other in over a year (ha!). What is also new is that we now get regular chapters from Charlotte’s point of view, which is at the same time exhilarating and also terrifying. While Jamie is a somewhat known entity with a certain way of telling things and in general observing and recognising things, Charlotte has up until now mostly been unknowable and idolised by Jamie. That obviously had to change after the events of the last book.
Charlotte’s mind is at the same time a very clean and analytic yet also complicated and dark space. She’s rather taken the manic-pixie-dream-girl to town and twisted her into something even more self-destructive but also tortured. Her flashbacks about how she became who she is, which she will possibly never allow Jamie to know about had me understand her in a whole different way and I can now see how she arrived at the actions she thought she had to take and I also feel how and why she’s so conflicted about her emotions.
Jamie’s, as always, has been a comfortable perspective to occupy although I also have to say that he has changed quite a bit in this book and matured about a lot of things. Even if I still think that he is too quickly too dependent on whichever company he keeps. Guy should be more comfortable to be on his own. Or more observant in who he chooses to surround himself with. Nevertheless, I’d still like to read his tortured prose.
This book has a sort of closing and the series could comfortably end here, but I’m more than happy to report that there will be a fourth book out next year. I just hope that in-book-time won’t also be a year in-between because I’d really like to see the next couple of weeks/months unfold after how this book ended.

Have you had time-jumps in books which you’d rather have read in real time than hear about after the fact? Share your thoughts on those books and your teasers in the comments!