The Dead Place
by Rebecca Drake
Copyright: 2008
Pages: 359
Read: June 4-8, 2016
Rating: 3/5
Source: Paperbackswap
Blurb: The first victim is found floating in a creek – naked, beautiful, brutally garroted. Lily Slocum was a college student with everything to live for and nothing to fear … until a madman made her his obsession…
At first glance, a quiet campus town like Wickfield seems like the ideal place for Kate Corbin to start over after a traumatic attack. But when another young girl disappears on her way to class, Kate’s fear resurfaces in earnest. She’s right to be afraid. Behind Wickfield’s picture-perfect facade, a nightmare is unfolding … and it’s about to strike chillingly close to home…
A serial killer is on the loose … ruthless, twisted, and lethally smart. Now, locked in a desperate race against time, Kate’s only chance of stopping a madman’s grisly game is to venture deeper into a diabolical web where no one is who they seem to be … and the smallest mistake could be her last…
Review: My thoughts on this book are going to be difficult to explain. First off, it’s not a bad book. However, I can’t really say that I enjoyed it all that much. It was just an “eh” read for me.
You see, I couldn’t stand the main character – Kate. I understood that she had been through a traumatic experience (rape), but at the same time, she was also losing her grip on reality completely. And yet she fought the idea of therapy/medication to help her function properly. She made wild accusations and did incredibly stupid things throughout this book. It’s precisely because of her behavior that I just couldn’t stomach much more of her. And then at the end it was like nothing had ever happened – everything was all hunky dory! I don’t know … her character just didn’t work for me…
There were a lot (and I mean a lot) of really stupid grammatical errors that should have been caught before publication. This also didn’t help my opinion of this book.
The plot didn’t seem very interesting to me – I’m pretty sure I could have read something along these same lines somewhere along the way in the last 10+ years that I’ve been reading thrillers. So there wasn’t anything “new” … no great twist, no surprises. It was (and I hate to use this word in reviews) predictable.
So bottom line … not a terrible book, but definitely forgettable.
