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REVIEW: Sundial by Catriona Ward
Sundial, much like its atmospheric veracity, blew me away. I stood in the desolated desert and allowed the dust and the sound of longing carried by the wind to scratch at my skin. I’ve never been one for extremes, especially the heat but this novel made it more claustrophobic, more suffocating, and felt myself clawing for the cool. Sundial had everything that I love in a horror story…oppressing sense of dread. A threat that is entirely human. A will to protect and survive. Horror isn’t exclusively about ghost stories, the supernatural, and things that go bump in the night. Horror examines just how the humanity (or lack thereof) of our…
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REVIEW: The Search Party by Simon Lelic
The Search Party is a story that aims to entangle the reader into the web Simon Lelic has so expertly weaved. It incorporates the fear and danger of the forest – personally, there’s nothing more frightening than the open forest in the dead of the night. The branches reaching out and enveloping you in a death hug, the eerie noises that can empale you with terror, and the dark longs to crush you with its inky blackness. A group of friends is one member down, a disappearance, and the remainder of the group decides to lead a search party to locate her. However, what are their motives, and are they…
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REVIEW: What His Wife Knew by Jo Jakeman
What would you do if everything you knew, everything you lived for was suddenly snatched away at the drop of a hat? What His Wife Knew is a novel portraying a Wife’s denial and grief at being told her husband has died by Suicide. The remnants of her and her children’s lives are now a scattered ruin. She doesn’t know how to parent them in a way that they need, she can’t face doing the things that gave her pleasure…she is left in a wasteland of pain. With all, why does her husband committing suicide feel so wrong? The situation in What His Wife Knew is one of my worst…
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REVIEW: Hide by Nell Pattison
Hide was a difficult book for me to rate. It didn’t work all that well for me. The cover is extremely enticing, and the plot sounded like one of my favourite thriller tropes – whiteout conditions. A lot of people think that the snow is this beautiful phenomenon that reminds them of Christmas time and sitting around an open fire. I, however, have always found it just a bit too scary. Imagine being caught in whiteout conditions, you can’t see anything, and someone or something could easily sneak up on you without your knowledge. Scary stuff! However, the plot was a bit flat for me. Imagine spending Christmas with those…
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REVIEW: The Woman on the Pier by B.P. Walter
The Woman on the Pier…going, to be honest here, I felt like the title was the biggest spoiler. It’s not until you finish the book just how big a spoiler you have been dealt. The story dealt with difficult content and if you are triggered by child death and terrorist attacks, I would advise you to stay clear of this one. A mother and father grieving for their teenage daughter’s lost life and potential, Jessica. A marriage crumbling from the very seams. Secrets that could destroy everything. Jessica planned to visit her friend in Somerset so why on earth was she killed in a terrorist attack at Stratford train station?…
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REVIEW: The Killer in the Snow (DI James Walker #2) by Alex Pine
Very few authors can keep me engrossed in a story from the beginning, through the middle until the very end. Alex Pine has done just that with The Killer in the Snow. The cover initially pulled me in, but I stayed for the storyline. A family massacre with mother, father and daughter killed in cold blood. It initially looks like a murder-suicide but as the investigation delves deeper it’s found to have dark connotations to a similar murder/suicide on the same property twenty-four years ago. Are the two connected? Or is this a deathly case of coincidence? If you’ve been a follower of my blog for any length of time,…
