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by David Barclay
The story starts out in Stockholm, Sweden, 1938. A Physicist is being followed by the German secret police, his life in danger. A very dramatic scene portrays the fear of the Nazis and their cruelty.
Then Chapter One brings us to the present day and we meet Katelyn, a very independent woman who works in public relations for an oil company. When two hundred and fifty oil workers mysteriously vanish from the offshore Aeschylus drilling platform without a trace, production stops, communications cease, and Katelyn gets a surprise and finds herself deeply involved in the mystery.
The chapters continue to alternate between 1938-9 and modern day and are generally suspenseful and serious, but an occasional piece of humor slips in to break the tension. I did feel like I was reading two different stories concurrently, which of course I was, which threw me a little at first but I got used to it, and I had faith that a connection would be made eventually. The connection did come, but not as significantly as I was expecting.
The Horror elements of the story were well done. It's technically a Thriller, but has elements of both. The dramatic bits are suitably suspenseful and done at an effective pace. There are a few triggers involving cruelty to animals and children, but they are integral to the plot. The action gets very intense at times, as you would expect in a Thriller. I did find some of the later action in the book a little too fast paced and subsequently hard to keep up with. I also felt that the ends of some of the later chapters were getting almost cliché in their use of cliff-hanger last lines of the chapter. Some of them seemed a little too contrived.
The story definitely held my interest, though it sometimes left me exhausted and feeling all the negative emotions portrayed in the plot. From that point of view, it definitely did its job effectively and the writing was good. As I was reading a pre-release galley, I expect the few typos will have been corrected before release. I would definitely recommend this to readers of Thrillers, as long as they don't mind a certain level of gore and disturbing situations.
