Her Darkest Nightmare
Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Brenda Novak
Evelyn Talbot Chronicles, Book # 1
St. Martin's Paperbacks
August 30th, 2016
ebook
416
English
February 8, 2019 February 11, 2019
THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER
Evelyn Talbot knows that a psychopath can look perfectly normal. She was only sixteen when her own boyfriend Jasper imprisoned and tortured her—and left her for dead. Now an eminent psychiatrist who specializes in the criminal mind, Evelyn is the force behind Hanover House, a maximum-security facility located in a small Alaskan town. Her job puts her at odds with Sergeant Amarok, who is convinced that Hanover is a threat to his community…even as his attraction to beautiful Evelyn threatens to tear his world apart.
BEGINS WITH AN ESCAPE FROM HER PAST
Then, just as the bitter Alaskan winter cuts both town and prison off from the outside world, the mutilated body of a local woman turns up. For Amarok, this is the final proof he needs: Hanover has to go. Evelyn, though, has reason to fear that the crime is a personal message to her—the first sign that the killer who haunts her dreams has found her again... and that the life she has so carefully rebuilt will never be the same…
About the book
Book starts with a brief chapter about a crime committed in the past. A 16-year-old girl, Evelyn, kidnapped and tortured for 3 days by her high school boyfriend, is able to run away from her tormentor. 20 years later, the same girl, now a woman, is a psychiatrist running a maximum-security facility located in a small Alaskan town and she is the doctor studying their behavior.
A prisoner says something chilling to the doctor, something bad is going to happen and it won’t be because of the prisoners, but because of someone from the outside. In the meantime a new prisoner arrives in Alaska, Anthony Garza and with him a bad snow storm.
After a night gone bad with the doctor, sergeant Benjamin Murphy, known as Amarok, is called by the owner of the local pub because he finds a mutilated head. It’s Lorreine, a local woman who works at Hanover House, the maximum-security facility. Has a prisoner escaped?
The book involved me from the beginning, the mystery of the first assault and what it brought, its consequences and knowing that Evelyn’s attacker is still at large, I really enjoyed it. It doesn’t say explicitly what happened the summer before the this book, which is a flaw in my opinion (small interlude: I wrote this before knowing about the prequel, Hanover House, which explains what happened the summer before).
I think at some point the author or most likely the translator made a mistake because Amarok says “I don’t even have a crime scene to be examined by the unit of Albuquerque” (rough translation because I read it in Italian) which is absurd as Albuquerque is at the opposite side of the United States of America… maybe it meant Anchorage? I think so…
I liked the story and the plot, but at a certain point I wanted to strangle Evelyn. After all what happened to her, she enters”someone”‘s home (without saying who, not to spoil) and you just give up your gun? Come on, are you so stupid? I know that I’m writing from my home, comfortably seated and that nothing like this has ever happened to me, so I do not know how I would react, but come on, it’s such a cliché. Despite this, the book is really nice, I think that stories about psychopaths are my new favorite genre.
I love Amarok, he is considerate and attentive to Evelyn, he only wants her serenity, I hope he continues being this nice in the following books.
I have already seen that the book has a prequel not translated in Italian and so I bought it in English; 200 pages for 0.99 € don’t seem too much, so I made the exception of buying a “novel”. I don’t usually do it because I think it’s a waste of money. I also saw that there is already the second volume in Italian, but it costs too much, if it stayes like this, I’ll end up buying it in English (since it costs less).
1 coffee on “Her Darkest Nightmare”