The Book Stacks

The sleepy town of Grizzly Falls has a rude awakening when local detectives find the naked body of a woman tied to a tree. Dead. The problem is this isn’t the first woman they have found, and now they know they have a serial killer on the loose, haunting the icy Montana mountain roads.

When Jillian Rivers wakes up, she finds herself bleeding, in pain, and stuck in her mangled car. She screams for help and honks the horn as much as she can, but when she spots movement in the shadows of the woods, her instincts tell her that help is not what has come to find her…

Yet again Jackson has written a book that I was cautious about at first – I’m not usually a murder mystery reader nor a mass market book reader – and ended up barely being able to put down in the end chapters.

While I was a bit surprised at thinking of possibilities pages, and sometimes chapters, before the police in the book did, that did not take away from this being a very satisfying read.

Jackson does a fine job of keeping the reader second-guessing any conclusions s/he tries to make about what’s truly going on in the story which only adds to the tension and sense of anticipation as you’re reading.

One thing that I found annoying while reading this book was Jackson’s habit to repeat names in various ways. Selena Alvarez was mentioned as ‘Selena Alvarez’, ‘Selena’ or ‘Alvarez’ at different times in the book. It would have taken me less time to truly bond to some of the characters if Jackson used the full name once and then stuck to either the first or last name (with the understandable exceptions).

Even so, as the story progressed, I wanted less and less to put the book down. Jackson worked in one of my favourite puzzles to stew over – word puzzles – which kept me interested and thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading it.

Overall, I recommend this book. If I had some sort of start system of rating, it would get four out of five stars. With the amused annoyance of a loyal reader, I shall wait impatiently for 2009 when the second book Chosen to Die comes out.