Tag: #suspense

Book Review: Swerve by Vicki Pettersson

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

SWERVE by Vicki Pettersson is one of the best thrillers I have read all year! Extremely fast paced plotting and action even with flashbacks into Kristine’s childhood. No one in this story is to be taken at face value. There is always a twist that pulls you in to continue reading, make you cringe, or make your heart rate rise. This book does have graphic violence and is not for the faint of heart.

Kristine Rush is a surgical tech traveling from Las Vegas with her surgeon fiancé, Daniel, to visit his mother and friends in California for an engagement party on the 4th of July. Daniel swerves on the interstate and Kristine spills coffee everywhere, so they pull into a deserted rest stop to clean up. Kristine is attacked and knocked out in the ladies room. When she returns to Daniel’s car, he is missing, but his cell phone has been left in plain view on the driver’s seat. Then comes the call from a mechanically disguised voice that if she wants to see her fiancé alive again she must follow all of the following instructions.

The plot takes off from there and never slows down. This book was hard to put down, but I had to at times to get my anxiety level back to normal. The scenes of graphic violence are not gratuitous in this story, but they are explicit. Make sure your doors are locked and to clear a block of time because you are going to have a hard time putting this one down!

Book Review: Flawless Mistake by Rachel Woods

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars (Reading as a Prequel)

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars (Reading as a Standalone Novella)

FLAWLESS MISTAKE (The Spencer & Sione Series, #0) by Rachel Woods is the prequel to her series and establishes the characters and the “mistake” that brings them all together.

Spencer Edwards is out of work and money. She allows her half-sister to talk her into her ‘Dating Protocol’ scheme even though she knows it is criminally wrong. When she is sitting in the park one afternoon debating this turn in her life, a handsome and charismatic stranger, Ben Chang, sits next to her and she begins to want more. Spencer doesn’t believe in love or marriage, so in her fear of her growing relationship with Ben, she makes the “mistake”.

Ben Chang is not the man he portrays himself to be to Spencer. To cross him is to owe him. Spencer now owes Ben and even as she is horrified by him, she still finds herself drawn to him.

Sione Tuiali’i has a violent past that he wants to forget as his uncle has trusted in him and left him his resort in Belize to run. Once friend, now enemy, Ben Chang is trying to destroy Sione and Sione has to figure out why.

Spencer and Sione are on a collision course set up by Ben.

This prequel is a more of a set up for the novel to come than a standalone novella. It is great for me as I continue on to Flawless Danger, because I always want more information on characters and their motivations. I would recommend this prequel to those reading more in this series, but it does not give a satisfactory conclusion on its own.

Book Review: Girl In The Water by Dana Marton

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

When I was asked if I would like to review Dana Marton’s latest book, GIRL IN THE WATER, I agreed right away because she has always given me an all-around enjoyable and entertaining romantic suspense read. What a surprise I was in for! This story is more intense, dark, intricate and emotional than any of her previous works.

In the beginning of this story you are introduced to a man who only lives to drink and fight since his discharge from the Army. Ian Slaney blames himself for the death of his wife and twins while he was in Afghanistan. A world away in the Amazon rain forest, Daniela has grown up dirt poor, but happy with the dream of becoming a teacher. One day, a logger stops at her hut and Daniela is raped and becomes a prostitute like her mother. She is then trafficked to a whore house up the river when her mother drowns in a flood.

Their lives intersect with the murder of Ian’s friend and Army buddy, Finch. Finch had bought Daniela from the whore house to cook and clean for him. When she returns to find a dead body, she stays and pretends nothing has changed so she won’t have to return to her old life. But Finch has sent an S.O.S. out to Ian that he needs help and by the time Ian arrives he is dead. Ian must now deal with the mystery of Finch’s murder and what to do with Daniela.

They return to the U.S. and four years of growth and major changes occur. Ian is sober and working for the Civilian Personnel Recovery Unit of the DOD. Daniela has graduated from college. The secondary plot then pulls them back to Brazil to the area of Daniela’s youth for the recovery of a missing 7 month old baby of U.S. charity workers. The book takes off from here at a rapid pace revolving around stolen diamonds, helping trafficked children, and a romance that can no longer be denied.

Ms. Marton has written a romantic suspense novel that delivers a unique couple that both had to forgive themselves of their pasts to get to their HEA futures. It is also a unique and strong suspense novel filled with exotic locales, intrigue and danger. This is the third book in The Civilian Personnel Recovery Series, but is easily read as a standalone. This is a read that satisfied me on every level. This story is a banquet, not fast food. I recommend this book highly!

Book Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

The Dead Key is D.M. Pulley’s first book and the winner of the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award-Grand Prize and Mystery Thriller Fiction Winner. After reading and being immersed in this mystery, I can understand the awards. I lived and worked in Downtown Cleveland during both protagonists’ time periods and find this to be an intriguing fictional history and mystery of what happened to the old bank in 1978 and 1998 at 9th and Euclid.

Two timelines and protagonists come together to solve the mystery of the bank’s safe deposit boxes. In 1978, Beatrice Baker takes a secretarial job at 16 and begins to find that there are secrets to kill for at the First Bank of Cleveland. In 1998, Iris Latch is an engineer sent to the bank to do a floor to floor survey for buyers interested in the old bank building. She finds many rooms, offices and files exactly as they were the day the bank locked its doors in 1978. Even though there is a twenty year time span, both young women become endangered as they try to understand the importance of the keys to the safe deposit boxes in the vault.

I really enjoyed the two intertwining timelines and protagonists. Beatrice was a much more sympathetic and strong character. She faces extremely difficult personal problems and dangerous situations for her young age. Iris hates her job, parties too much and is not very responsible. I feel many of us at that age can relate to boring first office jobs, wanting to get away from home and few friends which can lead to bad judgement at times. Plot twists, spooky atmosphere and an interesting mystery makes for a very happy reader. I recommend this book highly.

Book Review: Lone Wolf by Sara Driscoll

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

If I see a book contains a suspense plot and a dog, I am definitely grabbing it! LONE WOLF (FBI K-9 #1) did not disappoint. The first in a new series by Sara Driscoll takes you inside the FBI K-9 unit and focuses on Meg Jennings and her dog, Hawk.

The action in this book takes off at the beginning with a bombing via drone of a government building by the National Mall in Washington, DC. Meg and her black Lab, Hawk, are sent into the aftermath for search and rescue. (The author gives a very realistic description of the scene and the work this team would do together.) This is just the start of this bomber’s agenda of revenge on government agencies he feels have destroyed his life. It is a race to find out who is behind this devastation and stop him before more innocents die.

The book is an easy to read thriller/suspense with a few graphic scenes of violence from the bombings. It is a page turner that will keep you engaged. Meg lives with her sister, Cara, who is a professional dog trainer and their dogs Hawk, Blink, a red brindle retired racing greyhound and Saki, a blue pit bull therapy dog. I especially loved this author’s take on pit bull bans, because I live with two pit bull rescues that I love dearly.  

With Clay McCord, a reporter from the Washington Post and Todd Webb, a firefighter and EMT, you have a bit of possible romance in future books. There are also two other teams of FBI K-9s, Brian with his German shepard, Lacie, and Lauren with her border collie, Rocco. There is a lot of information besides plot in this first book. I would like to see future books in this series have more attention given to character depth, but besides that, I felt this was a great start to a new series I will definitely be following!

Thanks very much to Kensington Books and Net Galley for allowing me to read the eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Feature Post: The Huntress/FBI Thriller Series by Alexandra Sokoloff

The Huntress/FBI Thriller Series:

huntress-moon #1      blood-moon #2

cold-moon #3    bitter-moon #4

 

I had always planned on doing a Feature Blog about this series and since I just posted my review of the fourth book in the series, Bitter Moon, I decided it might as well be now. I was lucky enough to be asked by Alexandra Sokoloff if I would be interested in reviewing her third book of the series, Cold Moon, many moons ago. Besides being the first book that I would seriously review for publication, it was also my introduction to Net Galley. I fell in love with both the series and the site!

If you are a reader like me, I could not start on the third book, so I went back and purchased the first, Huntress Moon and the second, Blood Moon. I am very happy that I did. This series, at least in my opinion, cannot and should not be read as standalones.

The characters, both main and secondary, are complex and three dimensional within the series. For me, that is one of Ms. Sokoloff’s greatest strengths in these stories. The plots are fast paced, intriguing and believable, but it is the characters that keep drawing me back. There is explicit violence in each book, but one of the main characters is a psychotic, serial-killer, vigilante so it is to be expected.

This is a must read series for me and I anxiously await the publication of each book. Ms. Sokoloff’s writing is superb. I recommend you start now. Four books is doable!