Mini-Review: Dark Road Home, After The Fog Clears, Man Made Murder

minireview

Time for some mini-reviews! What are mini-reviews, you ask? As the title suggests, these are short reviews, consisting of one paragraph tops, about a book. It’s a way to catch up on the books I’ve read a while ago, but never got around to reviewing.

Dark Road Home

Tite: Dark Road Home

Author: Anna Carlisle

Genre: Mystery

Rating: 4 stars

Purchase: Amazon

The summer after she graduated from high school, Gin Sullivan’s little sister Lily went missing. Her family fell apart, not to mention her relationship with her high school sweetheart, Jake. Now, almost twenty years later, Gin is living in Chicago and working as a medical examiner when she gets the call: a body’s been found in the woods outside her small hometown. It could be her sister. After all these years, it’s time for Gin to go home and face the demons she tried to leave behind.

Confronting your past is never easy, but for Gin it also means confronting Jake, who was the prime suspect in Lily’s disappearance. To find an answer to the question of what happened to her sister that fateful summer, Gin makes the difficult decision to use her talents as a medical examiner to help the police investigation. But as Gin gets deeper into the case, she uncovers a shocking truth that could change everything–if it doesn’t destroy what’s left of her and her family first.

Buried secrets come to light in Dark Road Home, Anna Carlisle’s sharp and simmering debut mystery.

Review: Gin’s little sister went missing years ago. Now she’s called back home because Lily’s body was found. She’s confronted with the past, with secrets guarded for years, and with Jake, who was the prime suspect in Lily’s disappearance. Amazing writing, and I had no trouble understanding Gin and her thoughts and actions. While some twists were predictable, overall I really enjoyed the book.

After the Fog Clears

Title: After the Fog Clears

Author: Lee Thompson

Genre: Horror

Rating: 3,5stars

Purchase: Amazon

When a policeman accidentally runs over a young boy on a fog-shrouded street in Saginaw, Michigan, it thrusts three families into a head-on collision with grief, violence and chaos…

Officer Nathan Hazzard: for years now a dirty cop and on the brink of losing touch with reality, willingly releases himself from society’s shackles…

Luther Anderson: a young man whose only true concerns up to the day of the accident is to care for his crippled brother and their grandmother, becomes the target of intense hatred…

Raul Spencer: a disgruntled son working at his father’s funeral home; an adulterer, who fears his sins will find him out, blames everyone else for his problems even as his selfishness leads him ever more astray…

Geneva Spencer: the wounded mother who holds her dying son in her arms and finds that there is no one there to hold her as the life she knew takes a dark turn once Officer Hazzard starts pursuing her for reasons she can’t begin to understand…

In the fast-paced Suspense novel, After the Fog Clears, author Lee Thompson probes the fractured psyches of the lost, the abandoned, and the psychotic.

Review:  The author did a good job describing the characters, and making them feel realistic, even in such a difficult plot. All situations here ended up interconnecting, but often through an insane amount of coincidences. Despite that, the story was intriguing enough to keep me entertained. I would’ve given it a higher rating had some of the scenarios not seemed so unlikely.

Man Made Murder

Title: Man Made Murder

Author: Z. Rider

Genre: Horror

Rating: 4 stars

Purchase: Amazon

When guitarist Dean Thibodeaux tries to score weed the night before his band goes on tour, the deal ends in a brutal attack he wasn’t supposed to survive. Stiff, bloody, sore—but alive—he boards the bus with his band, determined to keep the one thing that’s important in his life on track.
Carl Delacroix failed his sister. And in the dead of night, with a gun in his waistband and nothing left to lose, he fails her again: his hesitation lets her killer get away. Short on sleep, short on cash, and determined not to make a trifecta out of his failure, he takes off after her attacker. And finds himself following a tour bus.
Dean Thibodeaux is sick. He’s changing. And the thing that caused it is coming after him, intent on fixing its mistake.
One man is hunting evil. The other is becoming it. Salvation lies in the crossing of their paths.
Review: The story of a band mixed with the story of a man hunting for his sister’s murderer. You’d think it couldn’t be connected but Z. Rider crafts a masterful tale in which these two events become linked. The characters are believable, the writing style is compelling, and overall, it’s a suspenseful, chilling read.

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