Title: The Cure
Author: J.G. Faherty
Genre: Horror, Dark Fiction
Age Group: Adult
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
She was born with the power to cure. Now she’s developed the power to kill.Leah DeGarmo has the power to cure with just a touch. But with her gift comes adark side: Whatever she takes in she has to pass on, or suffer it herself. Now a sadistic criminal has discovered what she can do and he’ll stop at nothing to control her. He makesa mistake, though, when he kills the man she loves, triggering a rage inside her that releasesa new power she didn’t know she had: the ability to kill. Transformed into a demon of retribution, Leah resurrects her lover and embarks on a mission to destroy her enemies. The only question is, does she control her power or does it control her?
The Cure started out with a blast, then grabbed an interesting concept and made it even more interesting and then…ruined all that by offering one chase scene after the next, descending into a non-stop rollercoaster of events so unbelievable they seemed laughable. Leah DeGarmo, our main character, is a veterinarian with the power to cure. She routinely cures animals from illnesses like cancer, or from car accident injuries and the likes. The downside is though that she has to transfer the illness she took into someone or something else – another person or animal, or else it destroys her from inside out. She keeps cages with terminally-ill, old animals just for that purpose.
But when she stops at a local McDonalds and ends up in the middle of a robbery, she has to use her powers to cure a police officer, and to transfer his lethal injury to the gunman. The gunman dies, the officer lives, but Leah has a lot of explaining to do. Worse, the officer isn’t the only one who knows her secret. Leonard Marsh, a powerful man suffering from an incurable illness, and his henchmen, have discovered her secret as well, and want to use it for their own gain. Within days, several different factions are on the lookout for Leah and want to use her powers for different purposes, from elliminating their enemies to prolonging their own life. Meanwhile, they threaten her that if she doesn’t comply they’ll hurt the officer she saved, a man she finds herself falling for rapidly. Will Leah be able to escape the clutches of the people who want to control her? And can she do so without succumbing to the dark side of her power?
I have no trouble believing Leah has supernatural powers – after all, that’s the premise of the book, and in fiction, pretty much anything is possible. But with this set up, the consequences have to be believable too, and they just aren’t. Within days of Leah’s secret being exposed to a handful of people, just about everyone on that side of the planet is trying to capture her. That made the story not only very repetitive, but also extremely unbelievable. As for the repetitiveness, the same things happened over and over again: Leah gets captured, they threaten to hurt someone to make her comply, she narrowly escapes, and repeat.
The book should be a horror novel, but it’s not really scary at all. The main character is unique though, and has some interesting abilities – which is a definite plus – but there’s nothing scary about her, or about the people out to hurt her.
So in short, I liked the premise and the start, but lost most of my interest halfway through. I did finish the book though, but more for completion’s sake than anything else.
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