One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Keye Street, Book 2
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 320 Pages
Formats: Hardcover, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Bantam publisher Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Atlanta private investigator, bounty hunter, and occasional police consultant Keye Street is feeling a little tense. She has been ever since she and her homicide detective boyfriend Aaron Rauser survived a couple of murder attempts last year, but the punishing southern summer heat of Atlanta in July is making it worse.

And it's times like this that Keye's demons ride her hardest.

Four years after her alcohol addiction destroyed her criminal profiling career with the FBI, the last thing recovering alcoholic Keye needs is her damaged, flawed cousin Miki calling her up and begging Keye to meet her at a nearby bar. But that's what you do for family.

Miki is freaked out. She claims that someone broke into her home, but after the police showed up and didn't find anything, they took one look at her record and blew her off. Thing is, Keye isn't sure she believes her either. She's been down this road before with her self-destructive cousin.

Then Keye finds a body in her cousin's living room, and the victim may be connected to Rauser's latest homicide case. Even as she kicks herself for not taking Miki seriously, this new development puts even more on Keye's plate. Now there's a murderous stalker on top of a bail jumper with bodily fluid issues and an investigation into a crematorium that may not be keeping the home fires burning.

The heat and the fear and the exhaustion on top of all of that start to make a drink sound like just the thing Keye needs to get her through. And this time, her demons may be too strong for her to defeat.


Amanda Kyle Williams is back with another long, sultry look into the day-to-day life of the mostly functional all-purpose bastion of law and order, Keye Street.

I love Williams' style. This isn't just a suspense novel or a psychological thriller. It is peccadillo-embracing, loony-relative-having, deep-fried-donut-eating Southern fiction wrapped around more than one bizarre case of varying criminality and horror. It's the sort of fiction you don't just read, you commit to, because by the time you're done, the narrative has taken you on such a slow, sweaty, southern journey that the characters are anywhere from old friends to bitter rivals...or both.

Keye is so deliciously flawed as a character. She's got issues. Big, juicy, career-ending, daily-struggle issues. And it's not just the alcoholism, though that is a huge part. Her life is a cautionary tale and Williams pulls no punches, as if she crafts every scene to display Keye's strengths and weaknesses in as harshly bright a light as possible. I love it.

I also love the subtle touches of quirkiness and humor, mostly sarcastic, that lighten Keye's nature (and the story) when things are at their most tense or bleakest. I love Keye's intelligence and her dedication to those she considers her people, be they close friends or family. Her cousin Miki is a real piece of work, but Keye handles her. Not always with kid gloves, but then again, Miki keeps trying to goad Keye into taking a drink. Lovely woman.

Keye still feels compelled to do the right thing. Miki is family. Period. End of discussion. So southern.

Unfortunately, the verdant, rich southern style did slow the pace of the tale. The first half of the book felt a bit boggy and plodding after the pulse-pounding start. As big a fan as I am of Keye and all her quirks, there was a lot of character-driven material in the first half, and the meat of the external, plot-driven story elements didn't really gear up until about midway through.

Once they do, several significant story elements built towards a surprising and satisfying conclusion that was ripe with personal danger and future implications. It's a good plot arc, for sure, and all the plot-driven elements were wonderfully convoluted and complex.

I wish less time had been spent focusing on Keye's never-ending obsession with alcohol. It's something that bothered me in the first book, as well. Her being an alcoholic (recovering) is a defining element of her character, I know. I just get a little weary of reading about it over and over throughout the story. Especially in this book, where I felt a more subtle application could have lent more emotional impact to events during the final conflict of the book.

That said, this book has provided me another solidly entertaining read. I love Keye, and while spending time in her head can get a bit harrowing at times, I find myself rooting for her. Liking her. Wanting her to be happy with Rauser and content in her job. Sober. Even when she makes me totally mental, I want her to triumph. But maybe that's just the Southern in me. Whatever it is, I hope we see more of Keye Street soon.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Length: 147 Pages
Formats: Kindle
Disclosure: A copy of this book was provided to me by the author for review. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




He found her standing by the railroad tracks, a small suitcase at her feet. Billy Ray didn't know who she was. Didn't know how long she'd been there. When he approached her, and she gazed at him quietly, he had no idea what to do with her.

She asked him who he was. She asked him if she could go with him. So Billy Ray took her home.

Even after two years, Billy Ray doesn't quite understand Charlene, but he also doesn't much figure he needs to. He knows he is no longer alone. He knows he likes talking to her, being with her. He loves when she smiles at him, or calls him "Sweet Billy Ray." He figures he loves her and stops remembering what his life was like before Charlene came into it.

Then the old man moves in across the street. Billy Ray doesn't know if that man is responsible for the change in his Charlene, he just knows she stops smiling, stops dancing with him, and stops sitting outside altogether after the day that old man knocked on their door. Oh...and he knows that Charlene burned the old man's house down. With him in it.

Billy Ray has no idea why his Charlene would kill the man. Maybe he just isn't smart enough to ever understand why she would do something like that. But even as Billy Ray reels in shock and loss, the hits to his heart keep coming, because Billy Ray finds out Charlene hasn't been honest with him. About anything, near as he can tell. And the truth she's so carefully hidden may just kill him.


Reading as much as I do, I'm always thrilled when I stumble across surprising little gems like this one. I loved this book. It's not a perfect read. There are some technical issues, and I had a few minor quibbles with some of the story elements, but I absolutely adored Billy Ray as both the narrator and the main character of the book and his story not only kept me guessing, but had my emotions twisting and turning even more than the plot did. And that's saying something.

Billy Ray is a simple man who had led a small, solitary life until he met Charlene. He's definitely uneducated, and either he has a mental handicap or he's just slower than the majority of the world. I couldn't quite decide which, because there were moments of surprising, albeit uncomplicated, wisdom in him, and he saw to the heart of things more clearly than others in several instances. He also touched my heart with his unadorned view of the world and the people in it.

Billy Ray's almost innocent simplicity is reflected in the narrative throughout the book, and combined with the mostly rural setting of the story, it lends the read a timeless feel that made it hard to pinpoint just when the story was set. It could been set anywhere in the latter half of the twentieth century or the beginning of this one. The suspense elements of the plot, however, weren't quite so feel-good and innocent.

In fact, from the moment Charlene's past starts to catch up to her, Billy Ray's life takes a turn and his story grows more and more compelling. I enjoyed it so much, and was both intrigued and confounded by the myriad of plot twists that kept me off balance and guessing blindly along the way. Billy's emotional journey throughout, and the revelations he experiences along the way kept me riveted to the pages. I was particularly impressed with how large a role his mental disability played in making all of the darker story elements really gel.

I did have some minor concerns with the few police procedural elements alluded to in the story. I'm not sure I was completely on board with just how badly two separate murder investigations were run, even though I understood that there were two small town sheriff offices with limited experience and resources involved. It still seemed a fairly convenient reason for so many things to be handled so poorly.

More troubling to me than that, though, was the lack of a proper explanation for a plot thread that played a major role in the story. The name on the back of the picture was never explained and it stopped being mentioned entirely before the end of the book. It was just left dangling as if it was no longer important, but the action of more than one character was significantly affected by it. It was disappointing.

That said, the way Billy Ray slowly delved deeper and deeper through layer after grim and gritty layer of the details of Charlene's life - both willingly and unwillingly - was so masterfully done that I spent every minute of the last half of the book hanging on every word. I know I said it before, but I loved him so much. And I loved this book.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Millennium, Book 1
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 590 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle




Journalist Mikael Blomkvist has taken a personal and professional hit, one that comes with a three month jail sentence for libeling a financial mogul. As crooked as the untouchable giant is, Blomkvist's passion for justice was no match for the power of money. It was a harsh lesson to learn, and one that put his career and everything he holds dear on the line.

Following his conviction and public embarrassment, Blomkvist receives an unexpected request from a man known for being one of Sweden's premiere industrialists. With that call comes an opportunity that will change the course of Blomkvist's life.

Forty years ago, a young woman, niece of industry giant Henrik Vanger, disappeared from the mostly family-owned island where she was staying. Once a year every year since that fateful horror, her killer has taunted Henrik with memories of the beloved child, with his failure to protect her, with his failings as both a man and a corporate giant. Forty years Henrik has been haunted by inaction and cold leads. Now in his eighties, he wants answers, and in Blomkvist, he thinks he's found the tool necessary to dig for those answers, whatever they may be.

As Blomkvist's and Vagner's lives start to intersect and a family dynasty suffers intense scrutiny, a young girl will be drawn into the hunt. Brilliant and cold, odd and passionless, Lisbeth Salander doesn't have friends so much as she has people she probably wouldn't kill. A savant at information gathering, it is her skill set more than her personality that appeals to Blomkvist. At first.

The alliance they form and the attention they put towards a mystery that spans the last century will uncover a rotten core of pretty lies and powerful deceit. Together Blomkvist and the girl with the dragon tattoo will try to solve a case that has baffled police and criminalists for years so they can bring closure to a man in the twilight of his years. The race for the truth will become a cat and mouse game that will threaten their lives and rip apart their souls. Unfortunately, solving that extremely cold case is one thing. Living with the answers...that's quite another.


I avoided this book for so long, and for fairly predictable reasons. So much hype, and most everyone talking about it like it was the best thing ever written. I know myself well enough to know that those types of books usually don't work for me the same way they seem to for everyone else.

To a degree, that was exactly the case with Larsson's incredibly popular debut. I didn't think it was the most incredible book I'd ever read. I did, though, like it. Parts were absolutely awesome, thrilling, suspenseful, intriguing, and completely worthy of every ounce of praise it's received; some parts bored me to tears (like the first 200 pages or so). I wasn't crazy about Blomkvist, who I didn't much like as a man, but respected quite a lot as an investigator and a journalist. I loved Lisbeth Salander intensely.

In fact, where the first two hundred or so pages struck me as rather emotionally flat and colorless, including character introductions, so much exposition I would have happily been struck blind as I was wading through it, and a mind-numbing expose on the financial climate in Sweden, every word of every scene with Lisbeth was vibrant...and slightly off-kilter...and excessively colorful. The girl is not normal, but I sorta fell in love with her morally ambiguous and sometimes cruel little heart.

She was the sole reason I kept reading...right up until Blomkvist and Vagner meet. From that point on, it felt like I was in another hemisphere reading a completely different book in a totally new language. Maybe I just related more to an uncle's pain and sense of loss, or was captivated more by his extensive and decidedly peculiar family history (sorta like the Adams family meets the Manson family). I know my interest is more piqued by the missing and the dead than capitalist crooks with dollar signs where their hearts should be.

And when, finally, Blomkvist and Salander start working together directly...well that's when this book shined its brightest for me. I loved them together. I still didn't much care for Blomkvist as a man, and I think he's got some serious issues with women, but he and Salander just fit together in the story in a way that took me aback, I enjoyed it so much.

That's what I'll take from this book that both thrilled me and bored me. That's what I'll remember most. In time, maybe I'll forget the first two hundred or so pages and remember only the last three hundred and fifty or so. I don't consider this the greatest book I've ever read, and I do think there was a ton of superfluous detail that did nothing for the story at all. I liked it, though. Parts I completely loved. And the girl with the dragon tattoo...well, she just totally rocked.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 352 Pages
Formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Paperback (Available for Pre-Order)
Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book through the Amazon Vine program at Amazon.com. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Taylor Jackson, Book 7
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 400 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Mira publisher Harlequin via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Not A Good Place to Start

Taylor Jackson hasn't been doing well since the serial killer known as the Pretender almost killed her. She's ever-so-slowly recovering physically, but she's mute, her nightmares are monstrous, and she's popping pills like they're Tic Tacs. On top of that, her friendship with her best friend Sam has been strained since the Pretender kidnapped and tortured the medical examiner, and she's still feeling betrayed by her fiancé, Baldwin. All she wants is to get back to the job, but riding a desk isn't her style and until she can find her voice again, that's all she's good for, even if the doctors would let her come back.

When Scotland Yard cop and friend Memphis Highsmythe offers her the use of his castle in the Scottish Highlands, Taylor is leery. She knows Memphis has feelings for her, so does Baldwin, and she can't see him being okay with her gallivanting across the pond and practically into his arms. Not that there would be any of that. Things may not be totally good with Baldwin, but she loves him. Still, Taylor needs this change of scenery desperately, so she finally accepts.

The castle and grounds are something out of a fairy tale, so beautiful that it takes Taylor's breath away, and Memphis is solicitous to the extreme. It isn't until Memphis returns to London on a new case and Taylor has a few days to herself that she starts to feel something isn't right at the castle. While the place is reported to be haunted, Taylor has never been a believer in ghosts. Still, she can't deny that she's seeing things...feeling things...and all her hard-fought progress feels like it's slipping through her fingers.

With her actions threatening everything she holds dear and her mind spinning more and more out of her control, Taylor struggles to grasp onto what is real. Problem with that plan, though, is simple. What's real may just be trying to kill her.


I'm a first-time reader of Ellison and I definitely picked the wrong place to start. That makes reviewing the book particularly difficult, because I can only speak to my own experiences and they're not going to be remotely similar to anyone who has been following the series or who has, at least, read however many books there are that covered the serial killer known as the Pretender.

I can say that I found Ellison's writing style pleasant and easy to read. Her narrative was smooth, the characters were well-rounded and realistically flawed, and the moments of suspense and tension were highly effective. I was, however, completely disconnected from the story and the characters for the first sixty percent of the book. I had no clear idea what was going on, no firm grasp on the intended plot of the book, and no true understanding of the events that brought Taylor to the place she was both physically and emotionally.

Because so much of the content of this book was directly related to the Pretender - both surviving him and the characters getting their lives back on track after the devastation he wrought, a huge hunk of the book read more like a very extensive epilogue than a self-contained story. I didn't really get why Taylor was so unhappy with Baldwin, what he did to betray her, and I thought she was insane - and a little self-centered - to go to Scotland to be with a man who thinks he's in love with her. Sam's continuing issues with Taylor were understandable - to a point - but I couldn't really sympathize completely because I just don't have a clear grasp on exactly what went down and how it all played out...again, with the Pretender.

There really is a whole Pretender theme going on in the book, for sure.

The last thirty to forty percent of the book was far more appealing to me, because the focus switched to what was happening to Taylor in the moment, instead of in the past. That and the obvious quality of the writing and just as obviously flawed heroine were why I didn't dislike the book. There was just enough original story content, and I like flawed heroines just enough, that I found myself at least interested in events as they unfolded and the danger to Taylor increased.

For a first-time Ellison reader like myself, this book just doesn't work well. I'm fairly sure I would've loved to read the book or books that featured the Pretender, because from what I gleaned, that was more the type of suspenseful thriller that I enjoy, but I haven't, and it seriously impacted my appreciation of this book. I strongly recommend readers new to the series not use this book as the starting point to jump into it.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Keye Street, Book 1
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 304 Pages
Formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Paperback (Available for Pre-Order)
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Bantam publisher Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.



Seek And Ye Shall Find...A Gripping Read

As the heat of an Atlanta summer grips the lungs and rakes the skin with its searing, humid, punishing talons, a chilling crime robs a child of a mother in the basest, cruelest of ways. Death stalks city streets and a conscienceless killer saunters through the shadows of its wake, leaving nothing but broken bodies, grief, and blood.

Ex-FBI profiler Keye Street doesn't work these kind of cases anymore. Not since her addiction to the bottle torpedoed her career and a stint in rehab did away with most of the rest of her life, husband included. Now she makes her money the old fashion way, as a diversified licensed private investigator, handling everything from corporate investigations to unfaithful spouses to bail jumping. Whatever pays the bills and keeps her mind off her persistent, unrelenting thirst.

It isn't until her best friend and Atlanta Police Department lieutenant Aaron Rauser gets a taunting, insidious letter from the killer that Keye is asked to lend her expertise to the kind of case she trained for, learned for, excelled at before alcoholism triumphed over her in such grand and uncontested style. Sheer force of will and gritty determination keeps her dry, but the lure of deciphering the clues and digging deep into a killer's maniacal intent to rain slaughter down on innocents ups the ante.

Dodging professional landmines and tap dancing around protocol and procedure is easy. Finding a killer who leaves no clues and has no apparent pattern, even as the body count rises...that may actually be the death of her. If the strain of the investigation doesn't tip her back into a bottle first.


I love psychological thrillers. I love southern mysteries. I prefer my heroines to be strong as steel but flawed, smart but human - foibles and sins and fears and insecurities and everything else all rolled up into a fallible, sympathetic package. Having each of those loves and preferences wrapped up in an exquisitely crafted tale of murder and humanity and struggle and heat...woah. Happy reader here!

It's all about Keye Street. What a fabulous combination of flaws, peccadilloes, and keen intellect she is. Brash, a little intense and fearless, a little broken and self destructive, a little irreverent and corny, a little snarky, she's just a great heroine. With a narrative that's told from her first person point of view, this book depended on her being a solid heroine. Williams knocked it out of the park for me. I loved her. I can't wait to revisit her quirky internal monologue and view of the world around her. Even the moments when she was a bit too human, a bit too flawed to be totally likable, she was still very realistic and utterly believable. Hands down she's the best female lead in the Thriller/Suspense genre I've read all year.

And then there was the story she's living. Parts are chilling psychological thriller, parts charming southern mystery, parts are pulse-pounding action and suspense. It's all around satisfying. Williams' writing paints just as keen and sharp a picture of Atlanta and life in the south for a woman of mixed heritage, traumatic childhood, and painful past as she does of malignant sociopathy and murder. The subtle foreshadowing and deft control of meager clues in the search to discover a killer's identity and motivations were damn impressive, especially at the end of the book when, looking back, I had a clearer picture of how all the pieces fit together.

One aspect of the book in particular was either brilliantly premeditated or phenomenally coincidental - I still don't know if I was imagining it or if it was intended, actually - but I'm loathe to detail it and risk spoiling any aspect of the conclusion. The flip side is that I'm equally loathe to detail the two issues I had with the story that kept me from fully loving it in its entirety. Conundrum.

As delicately and as ambiguously as I can, I'll say this: there was an abrupt change in the relationship between Keye and Rauser. While I liked that change, I can't say it felt organic to the characters at that point in the story. The groundwork was actually skewed a little in the opposite direction, so it took me by surprise. Beyond that, the events that immediately follow that surprise were such that it made me feel like that change in relationship was a bit contrived to maximize emotional impact.

The second issue, and the larger of the two, I can say even less about without being too revealing. All I feel comfortable saying is that an aspect of the big reveal was very disappointing to me because it seemed to contradict information (arguably suspect and incomplete, I admit) gleaned from a lifetime of fascination with true crime documentaries, crime solving shows, and armchair psychoanalysis of aberrant psychology. I'm not saying that there is a contradiction, just that what I read conflicts with what I believed true about the depths of depravity mankind is capable of sinking to in similar circumstances.

Even with those issues, though, this book was a hell of a fun ride. I thoroughly enjoyed Keye Street and her band of merry accomplices (aka secondary and ancillary characters) and can't wait to read more about her, see how she continues to deal with her demons and the changes her life has gone through. Combined with Williams' ability to fold the Deep South up into a novel like a juicy, ripe peach and the devastatingly wicked way she pulls the flap back on the psycho murder box of crazy, I can only imagine where Keye's life is going to take her next. Can't wait for the ride.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Sharpe & Donovan, Book 1
Rating: 2 Stars
Length: 400 Pages
Formats: Hardcover, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC was provided to me by Mira Books publisher Harlequin via NetGalley.This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.



A Very Low Key Mystery
It's a cold, foggy Maine morning when FBI agent Emma Sharpe meets Sister Joan at the gate of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart convent. As familiar as the convent is to former nun Sharpe, the return is bittersweet. Sister Joan had called her because of their shared past, but it is her experience with art investigation that the sister needs.

Before she can question the sister or see the painting that sparked the nervous, almost fearful call, Sister Joan is murdered and the painting is stolen - both happening almost right in front of Emma as she waits by the gate for back-door admittance to the convent grounds.

FBI agent Colin Donovon specializes in deep undercover assignments and excels at being a self-sufficient pain in the neck for his superiors. After several exhausting years and a few deadly assignments, he's taking time to decompress with some camping and kayaking near his hometown in Maine. When his brother tracks him down to give him a missive from his friend Father Finian Bracken, asking he return to Heron Cove and look into the death of the nun, Colin reluctantly complies. His poking around puts him face-to-face with the prickly Emma Sharpe, and the game changes.

The two agents are soon embroiled in a widening mystery that stretches to a dead local artist, Viking mythology, the story of a lesser known saint, and the death of a troubled woman decades ago.

I have nothing but respect for Neggers ability to create and execute a well-developed mystery full of several potential suspects, conflicting personal agendas, and well rounded characters. Saint's Gate is a very thorough, complex mystery in that regard. Unfortunately, the focus of the mystery didn't hold my interest, the subsequent investigation was too low key to keep my attention, and a few trends with the manner of storytelling didn't suit me.

I liked Emma and Colin, but I struggled with their alleged burgeoning relationship. I wasn't convinced that they fit together and Negger's writes in a very internal manner that didn't translate the romantic plot threads to the page as well as I had hoped. That issue with internalization translated to other aspects of the plot, as well.

None of the characters were particularly emotive, so it was difficult to pin down how they were feeling about anything going on around them or happening to them. I have a hard time connecting to stories that are that low key. I find it difficult to care about events in the story if the characters don't seem to, and other than an issue with Emma's safety, there just didn't seem to be a lot of emotional involvement by anyone.

That's not to say there wasn't attention given to the characters, in fact, just the opposite. There is rather a large amount of dialogue and narration focus on the characters rather than the crime. Every character's personal motivations and history was hashed and rehashed in lieu of a murder investigation or an art crime.

That's when I started to notice a few annoying trends in the narrative. Too often I read one character or another could see that another was "holding back" some bit of information, and there were many mentions of characters seeing or knowing what is in another's thoughts or what their intentions were. I started to wonder why there needed to be any dialogue at all, or any investigation either, really, if everyone could tell what was in everyone else's mind or heart.

This is one of those books that I could tell would be appealing to many as I was reading it. Neggers writes with skill and obviously does the sort of research that makes her settings easy to visualize and her characters knowledgeable and realistic. But in part because of my personal reading preferences and in part because of how my mind works, it just didn't work for me.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Tiki Goddess Mysteries, Book 1
Rating: 2 Stars
Length: 228 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Bell Bridge Books via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.


Emily Johnson, broke and newly divorced, came to Mauai to help her uncle, after the geriatric and pitifully bad dance troupe who performed at her uncle's Tiki Goddess Bar, the Hula Maidens, had contacted Em to inform her of his declining mental health and sent her a one-way plane ticket. In the six months since she started helping him out, business has improved and the historic hangout is slowly getting back into the black. And that's despite the bar's nearest neighbor, an odious man named Harold. He had a habit of burning trash in his yard, despite being asked not to, and the trades carry the noxious fumes right over into the bar.

That was, of course, before his dead body was discovered roasting in the bar's luau pit.

The police investigating his murder are focusing on both Em's uncle and the bar's bartender Chloe. Business has never been better but the stress has never been higher. Em, along with the wacky women of the Hula Maidens, have decided they have to solve the crime and save their family and friends. Delicious homicide detective Roland Sharpe would rather Em not pull a Nancy Drew impression, but stopping her would take more muscle than even he has.

Em's determination to clear her friend and keep her uncle's name clear puts her in danger when her poking around starts to uncover potential motives for murder. If the killer takes note of Em's secret sleuthing, it'll take more than the quirky Hula Maidens to save her butt. It'll take a miracle.

Maybe it was bad timing, as the past few books I've read really rocked my book-loving heart. Maybe it was my too-high expectations, as I've read books by Landis before and like her writing style. Maybe it was the setting, or the plot, or the characters. Maybe it's a little of all of that. Whatever it was, I couldn't seem to connect to either the story or the characters in this mystery, and that made it difficult to enjoy Mai Tai One On like I thought I would.

I was expecting a lighter-toned murder mystery laced with humor that highlighted quirky and raucous secondary characters. I went into the book thinking I'd fall for the Maidens and chuckle along with Em as she amateur-sleuthed her way into solving the case. Instead I ended up annoyed with Em's character, frustrated and disappointed by her morally and legally questionable actions and obtuse behavior which bordered on stupid more than once. The Maidens didn't appeal to me, either. There was too much back biting and snarky nastiness between them and too many waspish digs directed at others to consider them sympathetic or entertaining or make them evenly likable throughout the book.

Roland's character was forbidding and standoffish, and though I was interested in him as one of my favorite characters, he was too often relegated to the sidelines of the storyline for my tastes. The small sparks of simpatico and attraction between him and Em were some of my favorite parts of the book, but they were too few and far apart to truly impact my entertainment level with the book as a whole.

The plotline of the mystery was fairly straightforward and it evolved at a steady pace with a narrative that was smooth and easily readable. Unfortunately the elements of the whodunit weren't all that mysterious, and I had the who and why figured relatively early. That's not necessarily a detractor for me, and wouldn't have been in this case had I been able to enjoy the characters more, but without that, the fact that there were few potential killers or motives became more glaring. Later suspense elements of the story were equally disappointing and a little odd in their development. I didn't quite buy the perpetrator's actions or motivations during the last part of the book.

For me, the book was disappointing. The cover and the story description gives an impression about the tone of the book that I don't think the story supported, and I don't think Landis did quite enough to make her characters as flamboyantly entertaining as she could have. I can forgive one or two of the things that didn't work for me in this book, but put together, there just wasn't enough left for me to like. I don't think I'll be revisiting the Tiki Goddess Bar and its patrons.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Length: 240 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An Advance Reading Copy of this book was provided to me by Bell Bridge Books via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.


It's Labor Day weekend and St. Simons Island, Georgia, is flooded with holiday tourists, even though a category one hurricane is churning in the Atlantic just east of the Florida peninsula. It's a minimal hurricane, after all, and not expected to show any real attitude before it makes landfall in South Carolina. Plus, everyone knows that hurricanes don't hit the coast of Georgia. The concave shape protects it from the vagaries of the world's most devastating storm.

Everyone forgot one very tiny but important detail: Mother Nature tends to scoff at absolutes...and she'll makes us pay dearly for the hubris of them.

Janet is intensifying fast, a unique sequence of weather conditions falling into place and turning a relatively weak hurricane into the single most devastating and powerful force on the planet, a Cat 5 monster that will scour the earth of everything in its path.

As it turns its voracious eye towards the Georgia coastline, Janet badly damages then catches a Hurricane Hunter plane, capturing it and its crew within her calm center after some bad intel had them flying in at far too low an altitude for their plane to survive intact. On the island in her path is a family vacationing from Atlanta, a family with a daughter who skipped out and a father who is belligerent in his ignorance of Hurricane Janet's deadly plans. As the first bands of Janet start to slam into the island, concern for his daughter's safety mounts until he and his wife are beside themselves. By the time they realize that the original forecasts on Janet had been terribly, horribly wrong it's too late to evacuate and their fifteen-year-old daughter is trapped behind the walls of a gated and closed house on the next island.

Winds too strong for breath, a storm surge that will eclipse the island's highest point, and no escape from either. Hurricane Janet is coming. And Death is riding her coattails.

My hat is off to H.W. "Buzz" Bernard, who crafted an intelligent and informative, gripping and emotional thriller that kept me on the absolute edge of my seat. I couldn't put Eyewall down. I couldn't look away. I was captivated within the first few pages and had to ride it out to see how it all ended up. That, to me, is what a thriller is supposed to do, and this one did it.

I suppose I could be a little critical of the formulaic plot, and anyone who's ever seen a natural disaster movie or read a natural disaster book has met the stock characters that it contains. There's the guy who knows better than his own family that there's no danger, disregards the warnings, and through his arrogance and ignorance, puts them all in danger. There's the willful teen who rebels against her family at the worst possible time and makes it all infinitely worse. There's the dogged hero, worn out by life for whatever reason but who steps up to the plate when needed. There's the experienced professional, the one voice of knowledge against a cacophany, who is invariably punished for knowing more and speaking up but is lauded alongside the hero in the end. And there are usually women who love them both because of it.

You've seen all or most of these characters many times before, and the formula won't surprise you if you're as much a fan of this sort of thriller as I am. In that regard, I suppose it's not all that different from any of them. But I am a fan of natural disaster stories for the very reason that I like that formula and enjoy those characters, and this one had my heart racing as the tension mounted throughout. And for several personal reasons I'll mention in a moment, this particular story really worked for me.

Bernard took a bad situation to its extremes, kept the tension high with a taut, driven narrative that shifted focus seamlessly, and while moving around his character archetypes, managed to make them relatable, believable, and likable (except, of course, for those you're not supposed to like). I rooted for them, hoped for them, yearned for their safety. I wanted to shake them when they were foolish, kick them when they were stupid. I was totally into the intensity, caught up in the risk and the looming threat, dry-mouthed at the realized danger. I was affected throughout the whole book. It was plausible (more than some may believe), it was gut-clenching, and it was written with intelligence and obvious knowledge.

For all that and more, the book just flat-out thrilled me on just about every level.

It also reminded me.

The date was August 13th, 2004. It was a Friday, which, really...so very apropos. I was sitting at my computer, happy to have the day off from work, as officials had closed my place of employment when the area fell within the cone of uncertainty for the track of Hurricane Charley, a small category two hurricane coming up into the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba. We were really a statistical outlier as far as the expected track was concerned, it was slated to make landfall in Tampa, about two hours north of my home in Fort Myers, later that afternoon.

I wasn't concerned. I did, though, have the TV on, tuned to the local weather because Charley was getting closer and, honestly, hurricanes fascinate me. We'd been warned to expect some wind, some rain. We'd been told it wouldn't be significantly worse than a summer squall as far as intensity goes, and it's Florida in the summer...we're sort of used to that. No. Big. Deal.

I was playing a card game online, sipping a soda, and chatting via instant messenger with friends who were more concerned than I was about what was slated to brush by us. I had no shutters or boards on my windows or doors, hadn't bothered taking in my porch furniture, had no cooler, no ice, no food stocked, no batteries handy, no portable radio set up, nothing.

Hey, Charley was heading for Tampa, and it was too small to cause us any real strife, and it was just a category two.

I'll never forget the moment I realized how incredibly stupid, how horrifyingly ignorant I, despite my fascination with hurricanes, had been. I heard it in the voices of the meteorologists during the joint broadcast I had playing on TV...what had been little more than background noise as I played and chatted. It was something I'd never heard before, so it caught my attention. It made me turn my head towards the picture on the screen, and what I'd heard became what I could also see, and neither the game nor the chatting seemed as important after that.

By the way, if you've never heard fear in the voices of trained and experienced meteorologists, be glad. I don't recommend the experience.

It didn't start with fear, though. It started with an odd and tight caution - that's what caught my attention. The National Hurricane Center had Charley steady on his forecasted path, but our radar, the same local radar I watched daily, was suggesting something else. The meteorologists were obviously hesitant to argue with the NHC but motivated to warn their viewers. A slight jog to the east...closer towards the coast...seemed to be more of a steady turn, and it could be clearly seen that Charley had tightened up, intensified.

A category two hurricane headed for Tampa was now a category four hurricane headed for... Well...

It was starting to bear down on the southern tip of Sanibel island as if it intended to jaunt along Summerlin Road on its way to the heart of Fort Myers. My home abuts Summerlin Road.

I spent hours wedged into my microscopic laundry room, couch pillows piled up under and around me, my two dogs stuffed into the adjoining downstairs bathroom. Bathroom door closed tight. I'd unearthed my portable radio - though the reception was horrible - and huddled in the dark, alone but for the dogs, listening to the weather reports over the wail of wind.

I was so damned afraid.

Fortunately (for me, anyway - a lot of others weren't so lucky and my sympathies were with them), Charley seemed to change his mind again before he hit Sanibel, jogging a bit further north to devastate Captiva and Port Charlotte. Fortunately Charley was small, with the most intense winds less than twenty miles out from the eye. Fortunately, the sustained winds where I live were not totally devastating and though damage was wide-spread, the gusts didn't topple anything over onto my condo or my car. Fortunately, fortunately, fortunately.

Maybe that's why Eyewall hit me so hard, worked so well as a tightly woven thriller. I'm not a meteorologist, so I have no idea if the events of this book could happen to the coast of Georgia. I know beyond a doubt, though, that it could happen. That to a lesser degree it has happened. I was there.

Oh, and one more thing... When Hurricane Wilma made landfall several miles south of us in October 2005, my windows were boarded, radio and candles handy, batteries ready, and both my hurricane kit and my cooler were stocked.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 384 Pages, 4744 Locations
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


The legend tells a tale of a mysterious and bizarre horror. The year was 1922; the place, a small township in Arkansas. It was a frigid night, a night when snow blanketed the ground in a pristine carpet...a night when a man was jerked out of a sound sleep by what he first thought was a gunshot. When the sound came again, icy fingers of fear raked dissonant shudders down his spine and he realized that the loud, metallic noise actually sounded like a heavy footfall...on his roof. As he rushed from his house in the dead of night to investigate, he hurried out into the snow and was aghast to see footprints...of a sort. Easy to identify, impossible to understand, cloven hoof prints were everywhere. Everywhere. On his roof, across his porch, over his yard, down to the river and on the other side...everywhere he looked were the unmistakable signs of something unholy stalking the earth.

Seventy years later, those marks returned on and around the mutilated body of a sixteen-year-old girl. And this was no legend.

Sarah DeLaune was thirteen years old when she stumbled back to her house, covered in her sister's blood, unable to speak of the horror she'd witnessed. In the fourteen years since that monstrous, tragic night, Sarah had lost so much, including her memories of that night, the ability to sleep without drugs that kept nightmares from decimating her soul, and, she feared, her sanity.

Now making a living as a tattoo artist in New Orleans, she was as skilled as she was damaged, heavily scarred by what she'd seen, whatever it was. Then came the night that her ex-boyfriend, homicide detective Sean Kelton, called to ask her to visit the scene of a grisly crime, one that had so many similarities to her sister's murder that there was little doubt the murderer was one and the same.

With one glimpse of the fresh ink scrawled across the victim's back, Sarah is chilled to the marrow. Something, some tiny something in the hideous desecration that had been a young woman brings back a distant shadow of a long gone memory, a sense of old knowledge that almost shoulders its way back to consciousness. With it comes fear and self doubt, and the horrifying realization that there may be one very good reason the memories of her sister's murder are gone.

For fans of dark southern mysteries and thrillers, you can't do much better than The Devil's Footprints. Stevens has penned a stylized narrative that sweetly seeps a Gothic lyricism so poised and powerful that it can rip readers from their coziest reading nooks and thrust them into the humid and verdant Old South with such force that the heady scents of night-blooming jasmine and magnolia waft from the pages of their books. The plot is a wretched, twisted, and well laid reflection of family secrets and childhood disappointments, of psychosis and rage; a haunting, haunted epitaph for long-dead and newly-joined ghosts.

Main characters Sarah and Sean are deeply flawed and more human for those flaws. Complex and conflicted, frustrating and sympathetic at turns, they are ultimately believable, if not always likable. Sarah's traumatic childhood is the impetus for the plot, and there is a lot of meat in that backstory, though told with a miserly hand to keep readers guessing. As the book progresses and truths are slowly and carefully revealed, the tension takes a firmer and firmer grip, drawing into question everything from Sarah's obsession with her sister's murder to the deranged wickedness of ancient evil. This is a totally creepy and thrillingly atmospheric story that didn't disappoint in tone, plot, or pacing. There was just so much done right in this book that it's hard to be objective on the points I most favored.

Not everything totally worked for me, though. Every once in awhile I felt the conflict between Sarah and Sean was a bit too contentious, that it boiled over into the investigation and the hunt for a killer and spawned petulant behavior, most noticeably in Sarah's case. I was also bemused by Michael's backstory. It was interesting, but it had no consequence or bearing on the plot, nor was fleshed out enough to add any weight to his character, so it seemed superfluous.

A couple of other secondary characters, Sean's partner in particular, were sadly underused. Danny LeJeune wasn't even a footnote after the first third of the book. I would have preferred he be utilized more and Michael less, because I had some problems with Michael's lack of patient confidentiality during his meeting with Sean. I would have liked to see the book stick a little closer to a police procedural in some places, so Sean was saved from occasionally seeming like an obsessed loner cop with his own agenda who relied on too-convenient psychiatric insight to solve his crime.

None of those minor complaints, however, detracted from the weighty beauty of the prose or the taut thrill of the horror, nor diminished in any way my appreciation for Stevens' writing style. Between this book and The Restorer, I have become a greedy fan intent on catching up on all the books I've missed. Decadent and delicious, they go down easy and strike deeply, and stand apart from the masses, as proud and stately as the moss-draped live oaks that populate the south...and just as imposing in the dark.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: Raleigh Harmon, Book 4
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 369 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


FBI Special Agent Raleigh Harmon needed this vacation, but she sure didn't need to get stuck on a ship with 2,000 other people invading her personal space. She's nearly desperate to get into the Alaskan port of Ketchikan and take a hike in the most beautiful landscape she will likely ever see, finding rocks and minerals to add to her collection in this geologist's paradise. Then a trio of deep, bellowing sounds shatters the air and further wrecks her already stressful vacation; three long, deep horn blasts that signal the ship's return to sea. At their mercy, Raleigh watches her hopes for some time alone disappear just as fast as the Ketchikan coastline.

Before she has time to grieve the lost opportunity, the body of a woman presumed lost overboard is found hanging from the side of the ship, and despite the cruise line's official leap to a label of suicide, Raleigh's forensic experience is telling her that there are too many inconsistencies, too many problems with the scene and the evidence to assume the woman's death was anything but murder.

What had been intended as a family vacation with her ailing mother, her aunt, and her aunt's best friend has turned into a high-profile homicide investigation of the producer of the Hollywood film production that had hired her aunt to provide some spiritual assistance to the cast and crew. And as the ship returns to its scheduled route, Raleigh has to deal with the grim knowledge that though the suspect pool is limited to the crew and passengers, the secrets and lies swarming around the crime go deeper than the ocean on which they sail. And she has until the end of the cruise to solve the case before the murderer disembarks and disappears forever.

With a sweeping panorama painted by the words of a true authorial artist and a layered plot of mystery, family crisis, personal challenge, and tests of faith, Sibella Giorello brings readers into the life of Raleigh Harmon and delivers a solid mystery that was thoroughly entertaining. This is the first book I've read by Giorello, and I don't intend it to be my last, and frankly, that surprises me. For several reasons, some of which are personal, I'm not a fan of Christian fiction and I tend to avoid it, but I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads program before I realized it was Christian fiction.

To be completely honest, it was only out of a sense of obligation to rate and review it as part of that program that made me pick it up once I'd received it. Also to be completely honest, it was the first page that hooked me, and all the subsequent pages that kept me captivated, enthralled, and impressed.

I'm more than a little in love with both Giorello's writing style and her characters, who were all so wonderfully three dimensional and real. Raleigh is a character with the most interesting flaws, but she's also strong, fiercely intelligent, and dedicated to a job that occasionally tries her faith and pushes her into compromising her ethics. Her mother's mental illness weighs on her heart and the actions she takes to protect her mother...and herself...aren't always honest, but she owns them. She's occasionally surly, judgmental, and a bit hot tempered, and she's not exactly dealing with her fiance in the most emotionally mature ways, but she's got the admirable ability to look into herself and acknowledge her flaws. Even when she's not necessarily so willing to work on rectifying them. I found her refreshingly easy to relate to and completely sympathetic as a heroine, despite some differences in ideology. In fact, I just flat-out liked her. And I loved, loved, loved Jack.

I'm guessing Raleigh has had a few contentious run ins with Special Agent Jack Stephanson in previous books, because their chemistry had a weight and feel of history to it that speaks loudly of previous development. As I have every intention of continuing this series, I can only hope their relationship continues, because I'm a romantic at heart and I think Jack's much better suited for Raleigh than her childhood sweetheart, no matter how nice a guy he may or may not be. Maybe I'm biased because I started the series here, but the synchronicity between Jack and Raleigh is totally entertaining and made a good story even better. I was particularly happy with Jack in that he adds some touches of levity to the story, lighting up the occasionally too-serious Raleigh, and providing the opportunity for some wonderful witty repartee.

Admittedly, geology, rocks, and minerals aren't really my thing, so there were points in the story when my mind started to wander or the story dragged a bit when Raleigh was hitting the geological high points, and I do wish the suspense and mystery aspects of the plot had come with a few more suspenseful moments. I was deeply moved, though, by Raleigh's struggles with a mother who sees her as a villain, and sympathized with the feelings a child has when she realizes that she's been thrust into the role of being a parent for a parent. I was also deeply grateful that while Raleigh's faith was evident in places throughout the book, it was also quite obviously personal and subtle woven into everyday aspects of her life, seeming more genuine for it, and thankfully, totally lacking in proselytism.

I'm ever so glad to have made the mistake that brought me the gift of Giorello's deft and accomplished storytelling and got me hooked on Raleigh Harmon and her series of crime solving mysteries. I am thoroughly and anxiously looking forward to finding out what comes next for Raleigh, her family, her fiance, and of course, Jack.

Disclosure: This book was received for free through Goodreads First Reads for the purpose of an honest rating. All ratings, comments, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: FBI Profiler, Book 6
Rating: 5 Stars
Length: 368 Pages, 6045 Locations
Formats:  Mass Market Paperback, Kindle


Every once in a while I read a book that affects me a little deeper, digs in a bit more, disturbs or touches me just a little differently than those I read the rest of the time. They're often the most difficult books to rate, because I can't qualify them as easily. Did I like? Love it? Those aren't the right words for something so deeply disturbing, or hauntingly chilling. Well, did I at least enjoy it? Again, enjoyment isn't even close. I'm left shattered, brittle...moved. Horrified and saddened by the damnable tragedy of it all yet deeply admiring of the talent it took to write.

Say Goodbye is one of those books.

In the mountains of Georgia there is beauty and brutality and, of course, there are spiders. A killer hunts his prey and prostitutes vanish. But so do little boys. Stolen to assuage a monstrous appetite. In those graceful, gruesome mountains innocence is irrevocably, irretrievably shattered.

FBI Special Agent Kimberly Quinn, now five months pregnant, gets drawn into a case that threatens her marriage, her unborn child, and the foundations of her sense of self. What starts out as a few potential missing prostitutes and an unsolved and seemingly random homicide of a former high school jock is all a part of an insideous web of such utter destruction that the scope is almost beyond comprehension. Just...look up.

I'm emotionally spent after finishing this book. Utterly wiped out. It's brilliantly written. Stylistically it's crafted just as intricately as any spider's web and is just as deceptively strong . Kimberly is a solid heroine, and Gardner has offered up her flaws, foibles, and fascination with pudding to create a complex but genuine woman struggling with the confusions and conflicts of looming parenthood. I didn't always like her. I sided with her husband on a few critical issues, but saw Kimberly's side as well, even if I didn't happen to agree. She was selfish at times, for all her intelligence and dedication, and some of her motives and actions were less than pure. No, I didn't always like her. But I respected the hell out of her, because I believed her. I believed in Gardner's rendition of a character who is very conscious of her own demons, and still manages to step on their toes now and then, even as they chase her.

Technically and stylistically, this book knocked it out of the park. The transitions were extremely effective and there were several long, hard looks at the descent into despicable evil. And it was so very scary that I was able to sympathize with a man-made monster. So very, very scary. The police procedural aspects of the story were perfect. Gardner creates characters, then lays out the clues, and spins it all into a taut, gripping, devastating story. I could practically feel the time ticking in the back of my head through every moment of the read, ticking and tocking away as my stomach clenched and rolled, desperate for some light at the end of a most desolate tunnel.

It must be said - must be said and re-said, actually, that this book is not for everyone. Readers need to be more than warned, there needs to be great big flashing lights and maybe a few of those disaster sirens going off for this one. Do not read this book if you are in any way sensitive to brutality against children, because there is plenty of that in this book.

Was it graphic...? It wasn't graphically described blow by blow, no...but it's plainly and coarsely referred to and mentioned several times in several horrifying ways throughout the book. The monster - and he is monstrous - is a pedophile who kidnaps, rapes, and kills little boys...among other things that are equally disgusting. The scope of his crimes, the level of his brutality, and the horror of the debasement of his victims are not spared in the telling of this book. Please do yourself a favor and try another one of Gardner's titles if you think you may not be able to handle that.

I don't consider myself a sensitive reader. I love books and shows that deal with psychopaths, watch and appreciate true crime documentaries, and am fascinated with aberrant psychology. I thought Silence of the Lambs (both the book and the movie) was brilliant and chilling, and Hannibal Lector will always look like Sir Anthony Hopkins in my mind. But Silence of the Lambs didn't affect me like this did. Maybe it was because the violence was mostly against children. Those are the most difficult victims to have to accept, and when coupled with the perversity of the antagonist, I was deeply disturbed.

Did I like it? Love it? No. In fact, it was disgusting and traumatic in parts. I appreciated the intelligence and style with which it was written. I thought the concept, plot, and characters were robust, fully realized, and freaky with atmosphere. I had a couple of minor issues with a subplot, and there was a plot twist that I saw coming a mile away, but they didn't affect my appreciation of the book. It was a polished, sophisticated novel with power and intensity.

And it was the most disturbing book I've read in a good long time.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 298 Pages, 8386 Locations
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


There's a right time for death. In the sultry heat of a Memphis night, a damaged young woman goes missing. A cop slips over the edge. A powerful man steps over the line. A powder keg of family secrets and despair ignites. And Ol' Man River keeps rollin' along. It's time.

He was once her lover, after a tragedy a decade ago united them. Now detective Billy Able is looking for the missing Sophia Dupree and wading through a morass of conflicting agendas and moral decay. To make matters worse, his partner Lou is acting irrational and suffering violent mood swings, taking his aggression out on Billy and almost getting them both killed. Then what first seemed to be a none-too-surprising (nor unheard of) binge weekend away from home starts to look more and more like homicide and Billy is left with an ugly suspicion about the perpetrator of the crime, a hole in his heart from his partner's actions, a laundry list of powerful people playing games with his investigation, and a sister of the victim (his ex-lover) he's drawn to despite himself. It's going to be a rough week.

With Sophia's sister Mercy as a subtle influence and a soft beacon, Billy lugs his personal demons around Memphis trying to get his case worked while the world around him blows up and flies apart. He's got a strong suspect and a lot of hate in his gut to fuel him, but the sum of his own sins weigh heavy on him as he plods his way towards answers, praying for closure.

A lyrical narrative with nearly poetic descriptions of the complex southern charm of the city of Memphis and the author's comprehensive understanding of the south and its inhabitants bolsters this solid southern police procedural, transforming it into something graceful but gritty. The characters may lean more towards archetypes than unique individuals, but in this case, it's part of the charm and familiarity imbued in the book.

Billy Able is a rumpled, harried detective who's driven to find answers, flaunting authority and skirting around the edges of outlaw. He's a solid cop, but he's also a flawed human being, and more interesting and sympathetic because of it. Mercy is a bit more of a puzzle, the ignored but invited daughter returned from the big mean city of Atlanta without any pomp and circumstance. Or notice. She, too, is damaged in her own way, though less flawed with it. Turner does a good job of providing some realistic development between them that felt organic to the situation and to their characters and didn't trip into any romantic suspense cliche. This is no romance novel. The only time I think the development surrounding their relationship evolution flat-lined on me was the very last scene. It seemed to me to be an odd way to end the book and I'm still not sure why it went that way. It was the only time that I felt the slight tinge of romance cliche cheese factor.

The antagonist and a couple of the secondary characters have some point-of-view threads running through the book, and some of those are positively chilling, and all inexorably woven into the fabric of the suspenseful story. Turner captured the tone and flavor of the south with artistic deftness and provided a complex and layered plot that offered some surprising twists.

I had a few rough moments with Billy, who was three dimensional and real, but not entirely likable through the whole of the book (most of the characters weren't actually - they were sadistic, narcissistic sociopaths). He was driven, always driven, but sometimes his stubborn propensity to drive in the wrong direction got on my nerves. There were a few aspects of the plot that I wasn't wholly satisfied with, either. A secondary plot thread featuring Lou's character was so heinous that it eclipsed the importance of the primary focus of the investigation, dulling much of my interest in the final 'figure it out' climax scene. I wish that secondary plot thread had been given the same amount of closure as the primary one, because there were far too many unanswered questions around that (like how the hell did the parties involved get involved to start with), and it didn't seem like anyone was asking that question as the story progressed.

Despite that, A Little Death In Dixie stands tall as a very well written southern police procedural, with enough deft touches and careful progression to impress on any level. Looking back on it after finishing it, I'll always appreciate the small, seemingly insignificant items that added a sense of foreboding or forewarning for the readers. And I'm always going to wonder if "Go Fish" was shortened from "Gone Fishing" for space, or if it was more of a pointed request or command to Billy, or possibly...just a reminder of a child's game. Or all three. Chilling.

I'll be keeping my eye out for more Lisa Turner books in the future. This one hooked me and I think it bodes well for future books. I very much enjoyed it.

Genre: Thriller/Suspense
Series: N/A
Length: Novel, 7304 Locations
Rating: 5 Stars
Formats: Kindle


If you're unfamiliar with Heather Killough-Walden, you may be missing some of the best reading available on Kindle. I stumbled across her paranormal romance The Third Kiss: Dorian's Dream and was so blown away by her style and imagination, that I quickly downloaded all her other available titles. And believe me when I say, it didn't break the bank, because The Third Kiss: Dorian's Dream was all of $1 and Hell Bent a whopping $1.99.

Seriously great reading combined with a stunningly low price...can I just say WOO HOO!

In Hell Bent, we meet Annabelle Drake. She works for a graphics design company and her boss, Max Anderson, is both a friend...and maybe more. He's finally asked her to dinner on a night when his teenage son wouldn't be home. As Annabelle heads to lunch with her friend Cassie, feeling a little glowy from the invitation, the glow turn to confusion and then fear when an odd text message from Max urges her back to the office - the locked and completely dark office.

The shock from the grimmest of discoveries rocks Annabelle's world and she desperately reaches out to her best friend, Jack Thane, a man she's known for ten years. Jack's not a normal friend. He's not a normal anything, really. He's also intensely in love with Annabelle and has been from the moment he laid eyes on her on her birthday almost ten years ago. He'd do anything for her - has done...everything for her. And as an assassin, he's well aware of everything he needs to keep doing. When the call from his Bella comes in on the phone that he keeps strictly for her to contact him, he knows something's wrong - she's never called it before. He drops everything and rushes to her side, quickly sweeping Annabelle away from the scene of a horrific crime, but he only starts to get the gist of just how bad things are when Annabelle tells him in no uncertain terms that Max didn't kill himself as the scene suggests. He was murdered.

Soon Jack is racing to keep the woman he loves safe from assassins just as deadly as he is while he shelters a growing number of people on the kill list with her. Annabelle's friend Cassie, Max's son Dylan, Jack's ex-wife and daughter...soon it's all Jack can do to keep everyone safe and keep Annabelle from the clutches of a very determined billionaire who is exceedingly intent on staying a billionaire - no matter how many people he needs to kill to keep his secrets safe.

Hell Bent is a roller coaster thrill ride and Annabelle and Jack are a fantastic pair of characters. Their relationship is complicated, complex, and difficult for both of them at times, but it's also immutable and intensely strong. Annabelle trusts Jack like no other, even knowing what he does for a living, but when Jack's secrets start to unravel as they're forced to evade danger again and again, so does their close friendship and soon their relationship is fraught with just as many perils as the situation they're in.

Killough-Walden has plotted this book perfectly, balancing the external danger and the plot of a brutal cover up with delicate emotional angst in a way that many authors can't even begin to comprehend, let along pull off. The characters struggle desperately to not get dead, racing across the country and then across the pond in a valiant effort while buildings are being blown up and bullets are flying and friendships are being tested. It's an exciting, dangerous thrill ride and an odd but utterly unique romance filled with genuine characters with human foils and foibles...and a bit of murder and mayhem.

Annabelle is a gem of a character, quirky, bright, dedicated, with a spine of steel and a core of determination that makes her a formidable heroine. Jack is fantastic as the lead male. A cold blooded killer by trade, it's clear his heart belongs to Annabelle, and the dichotomy, while perplexing, is also uniquely appealing and ultimately sympathetic. He's a bad guy...just not totally a bad guy...and some of his frets about keeping his Bella from hating him are actually cute and provide some humor to the situation.

The plot is fast-moving, the book long, and there's plenty of room given to develop the story and characters and do it well. Maybe just a wee bit too much room in one or two places that could have benefited from a bit of tightening and trimming. There were one or two times that I thought the constant attacks on Annabelle, Jack, and company felt a little like overkill, but they were passing thoughts, not true complaints, and the scope of the story never stopped developing alongside the action. There was only one part at just over halfway that I felt the action slowed a little and the story dragged a bit, but it was over before I got annoyed and another totally unexpected layer to the plot was added. From that point on, the book was right back at breakneck pace.

I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It was definitely one of the best action adventure books I've ever read, and I became so fond of the characters that I know they will stick with me. I would love a sequel or a series with Annabelle and Jack...even Sam, Cassie, or Dylan, and especially Adam - they're all unique enough and the relationships fresh and complex enough to support much more from any or all of them. Even if there's never a sequel, the impact that the story has guarantees that I'll be reading it again and again. Hell Bent is a story that quite literally has everything: rip-roaring action, bullets and bombs and beatings, a race against time, and danger, mystery, and suspense - and romance! It's fantastic!!

Other Titles by Heather Killough-Walden: