Hanover House
Crime, Mystery
Brenda Novak
Evelyn Talbot Chronicles, Book # 0.5
Headline
September 1, 2015
ebook
200
English
February 16, 2019 February 17, 2019
Psychiatrist Evelyn Talbot has dedicated her life to solving the mysteries of the antisocial mind. Why do psychopaths act as they do? How do they come to be? Why don’t they feel any remorse for the suffering they cause? And are there better ways of spotting and stopping them?
After having been kidnapped, tortured and left for dead when she was just a teenager—by her high school boyfriend—she’s determined to understand how someone she trusted so much could turn on her. So she’s established a revolutionary new medical health center in the remote town of Hilltop, Alaska, where she studies the worst of the worst.
But not everyone in Hilltop is excited to have Hanover House and its many serial killers in the area. Alaskan State Trooper, Sergeant Amarok, is one of them. And yet he can’t help feeling bad about what Evelyn has been through. He’s even attracted to her. Which is partly why he worries.
He knows what could happen if only one little thing goes wrong...
About the book
This is the prequel to Her Darkest Nightmare, series with Evelyn Talbot, a psychiatrist who runs a prison in the freezing cold of Alaska. In this book we see the construction of Hanover House, the prison, and the beginning of Evelyn’s relationships with Hilltop and with Sergeant Benjamin Murphy, known as Amarok.
We also see what happened to Evelyn while he was in Boston, a story that is mentioned in the first book in the series but whose details are not given.
I need to say that I first read first Her Darkest Nightmare and than this book, because I didn’t know about the prequel, so in my review there are minimal references to Alaska.
In this book we know the detainee Hugo Evanski and the first meeting with Evelyn is briefly told. Hugo, that he’s in a Californian prison in this book, will be a central character in the following book. Then Evelyn receives Amarok’s phone call explaining that Hanover House has been vandalized so Evelyn leaves Boston, where she’s living at the moment, for Alaska. Here in Alaska, we find out that the small town of Hilltop, where the penitentiary is built, is against its opening and the sergeant himself fervently protested before the start of the construction.
While Evelyn and Amarok try to figure out who has damaged the construction, in parallel we get to know what Evelyn’s attacker Jasper has done in all these years. Because Evelyn was the victim of her high school boyfriend who killed three of her friends and tortured her for three days before setting fire to the hut where Evelyn was dying (she obviously manages to escape).
Jasper is a new man, married with two adoptive daughters but who most likely continued to kill all these years (20) thanks to the fact that his parents paid him facial plastic surgery.
Unfortunately, having read the first book, I knew how this story ended, but I liked it anyway. Certainly not like Her Darkest Nightmare and despite being a short story I don’t regret buying it. The chapters are not very long and I like the author’s style.
I loved Her Darkest Nightmare, I like the characters and I’m happy to have found them here too. And I continue to adore Amarok, he’s so thoughtful and I like that he tries to involve Evelyn in everyday life, making her emerge from her shell.
