Mysterious psychiatric patient, Ruby, is being held and treated but a diagnosis hasn’t been reached and therapy has been ineffective, leading her psychiatrist, Dr Jack McGowan, to consider hypnosis. The therapy has detrimental effects on him and his team. When fellow psychiatrist, Dr Kristy Silver, learns about Ruby she sees the similarities between her case and one of another patient from the same small village of Woodsend.
Pursuing the lead Kristy finds herself challenging her beliefs and perceptions as she finds sheer terror as the result of her investigations.
Going by the description of this book it has an intriguing premise and sounded like an amazing horror read but, in hindsight, having just finished the book, it has a number of sticking points for me.
Firstly, there are a host of characters and the story is told from multiple points of view and from multiple points in time, which invariably leads to overlap and made the plot difficult to follow at times.
Characters such as Jack and Celeste seemed to be put front and centre then discarded once they had told their part, without any real resolution. This book was crying out for a decent editor.
There was more telling than showing and to give the author props, she did write the spooky horror element of this book really well, but just didn’t deliver a satisfying conclusion, mainly because there is another book in the series. The story seemed to be told clinically without much emotion in places.
The ending left me frustrated as we still don’t really know who Ruby is, the mystery behind the Father of Lies continues and I’m not sure I want to invest more time to be disappointed by another ending in book two as I’m told this is a trilogy.
It’s been a while since I have felt this conflicted about a book, especially a horror book, as horror is my favourite genre. No doubt more dark secrets are to come in the series I just wish I could count on the next part of the story being effectively told. This book is available to read for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Links To Book:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Goodreads
Ajoobacats Blog 
The premise for this one sounds really interesting. It’s a shame it doesn’t quite come off in the execution.
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I felt totally bereft as all the material was there it just needed pulling together.
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