Review: The Heatwave by Katerina Diamond

After a few disappointing reads, I was in desperate need of a great thriller. You know the ones; the kind where you don't even realize you've spent hours reading because the plot is so compelling. I picked up The Heatwave by Katerina Diamond because I saw a friend with similar tastes had recently left a promising review about it. It absolutely did not disappoint! Books like this make me happy and remind me why I love to read in the first place.

The storyline alternates between the past and the present through the use of two narrators. Felicity is a wife and mother of two who drops everything to return to her hometown when she sees on the television that a teenage girl has mysteriously disappeared there. This strikes a nerve with her because when she was growing up, another teenage girl went missing under similar circumstances. For reasons that aren't immediately revealed to the reader, Felicity feels like she is the missing link that connects these two disappearances. She sets out to do some investigating on her own, hoping to get answers to questions that have plagued her for years and save the latest missing girl. This is the first time she's returned home since she left as a teenager after having done something terrible. Jasmine is the narrator for back "then" when the first girl went missing. She is best friends with Felicity and lives a privileged life, spending her summers with her parents traveling the world as they do charity work. This particular summer, however, plans have fallen through and Jasmine is excited by the prospect of actually getting to experience a normal summer vacation. Jasmine's family has recently relocated and taken on a renter, Tim, who lives in a small garden house in the backyard. Jasmine can tell immediately that Tim is not the picture-perfect man her parents believe him to be. She embarks on a dangerous journey when she decides to find out what Tim might be hiding. Felicity and Jasmine's stories interweave seamlessly to tell a thrilling tale full of deception and depravity.

This book was just what I was hoping it would be! I have never read anything by Katerina Diamond before, but she is definitely an author I will be following from now on. I don't typically think too much when I read mysteries. I'm not a reader who is constantly trying to figure out the twists before they come. I simply read it and let the plot unfold as it may, but I wouldn't have been able to figure out the ending of this book no matter how hard I tried. There were several twists and reveals that I never saw coming. This book was just so...effortless. It was so easy to get sucked in and before I knew it, I had finished it! This would definitely make a great summer beach read and has been one of my favorites of 2020 so far.

My Rating: ★★★★★
At the time of this post, this title is set to be released on June 25, 2020.

Thanks to Avon Books and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Review: Those Who Hunger by Owen Banner

I do not often read supernatural novels, but I make an exception when I find a title that seems especially original. I am drawn to stories that attempt to weave supernatural elements into well-established settings because it seems like such a difficult feat. I was blown away by the credibility of Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Being a fan of Amish-based mysteries (like the wonderful Kate Burkholder series), I've also been curious to see how authors integrate the supernatural with the rigid social confines of an Amish community. So I didn't hesitate to snatch up Those Who Hunger: An Amish Vampire Thriller by Owen Banner as soon as it became available.

This "horror" story surrounds a series of vicious murders within an Amish community that hides a terrible secret-many of its members are vampires, cursed to hide their hunger for human blood or risk losing everything that matters to them. The Zook family knows this curse all too well. There are more vampires in their family than non-vampires. Haddie Zook is an Amish teenager who realizes she has the mark when a terrifying encounter with a predator initiates her transformation. She struggles with her new identity as she learns to keep her hunger in check. Meanwhile, Jacobo, a detective assigned to the violent murders in the community, is keeping a close eye on the Zook family, suspecting one of them is responsible for the heinous deaths of several innocent people.

It's difficult to go into much more detail than this without risking spoiling parts of the story for potential readers, so I'll jump into my review. This book was WAY TOO LONG. I've read plenty of 500+ page novels and I never shy away from a big book, but there's nothing more annoying than wasting precious reading time on something that could have easily been condensed into 300 pages. I felt like I was slogging through this and was horribly dismayed when I saw I was only 32% of the way through the story. The suspense and excitement did pick up once I got to about 80%, but I read for hours and felt like I was getting nowhere because the author spent so much time detailing random tangents that ended up having nothing to do with the main plot. (If someone else reads this, please come back and tell me what the purpose of the drug dealer scene was because I'm still annoyed by that.)

This story could have been easily streamlined if the author cut down on the number of narrators. I counted no less than a dozen different POVs within the first third of the book, some of which we only heard from the one time. This made things confusing for the reader and just added information that could have been more efficiently shared in other ways. In my opinion, the only people we needed to hear from would have mainly been the Zook family members: Haddie, Esther, Nehemiah, and maybe Roy for an outsider's perspective. Jacobo's random detective excursions were pointless and Mel's experiences, while tragic, really didn't need to be included. 

While this novel is listed as part of the "horror" genre, I would argue that it's more of a coming-of-age supernatural mystery with some gratuitous gore thrown in every now and then. Even the violent vampire attacks felt like they were over-the-top and more for shock and awe than anything else. Potential readers should also note that there are sex scenes and a few instances of animal abuse in the novel as well.

I struggled with how to rate this book. At times, I was thinking about one-star and others, I got up to a 3.5, so I'm settling on 2 because of pacing issues and how far-fetched I felt the ending was. There were too many questions left unanswered for me to be comfortable with the culprit(s) that were finally revealed. On the other hand, the writing was good and the story was detailed, even if excessively so. Fans of Amish characters and vampires will enjoy the mash-up of the two very different subjects. However, if you'd like to read about the worlds of vampires and the Amish colliding and don't want to devote your time wading through so many unnecessary pages, I'd recommend you try The Hallowed Ones series by Laura Bickle. I read these back in 2014 and remember liking them quite a bit more than Those Who Hunger.

My Rating: ★★☆☆☆

*Thanks to the author and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!