Wow! This novel by Gregg Olsen kept me guessing almost up to the point he decided to reveal the whole tangled mess. Now, I may have figured out who, but the how and the why….nope, I had to read that to know what the heck was going on in the mind of the schemes designer. If you love a good mystery/psychological thriller, this ones for you.
I thought I had read Gregg Olsen books in the past, but maybe not, because I had him set in my mind as more of an action/police procedural type author, so maybe I had him confused with someone else. Oh well, I’m a fan now, that’s for sure. And good for me, because he has lots of other books too….I feel a library binge coming on.
From the eerie description of the female Giant Pacific octopus (stuck on a page between the contents and Chapter One) to the swipe of the final page on my Kindle, I was hooked. There may not be a contents page in an actual book, either way, don’t start with Chapter One, read about the octopus. When you are done with the book, go back and read about the octopus again….seems even more sinister after finishing the book.
Here’s the set up: Chapter One starts with a kidnapping at a vacation cabin, which turns into a murder. I’m going to say that’s not a spoiler alert because you find out before you’re even a quarter way through the book that she’s dead. I’ve watched a lot of Dateline episodes….9 times out of 10 it’s the husband. However in this case, he was out in the boat, and saw his wife get abducted on the shore. There was also another witness who saw the action unfold, and a grandmotherly type in cabin two who heard all the screaming. So who took her? Stranger? Convicted felon? Who had a reason to want her dead?
Pretty much anything else I could say would be spoiler and I don’t want to ruin the mystery. I will say that the people in this story seem, at first, to live worlds apart, but as the backstory gets filled in, discoveries are made that show how intertwined they have become. The evil spawned by events both preventable and not, permeates their lives, becoming tangled around everyone involved, like the kudzu in Clarksville, TN…covering and choking out everything in it’s path until the kudzu is all that remains.
I highly recommend you add this book to your reading list. For me, #3 of 52 books to be read in 2020 is now complete. Actually 4 is complete too, but because of my procrastination issue, I have not done the review for that one yet. Happy reading everyone!