Categories
reviews

The Off Season by Amber Cowie was a thrilling, insidious ride that had me trusting no one.


Having just married someone who she had only met 6 months previously, Jane is left wondering what she really knows about her new husband as she goes off with him and his daughter to a remote location where he will be doing renovations on a hotel.

Soon they are isolated and Jane finds herself investigating both a disappearance and a death, all while finding things out about her husband that she doesn’t know how to take. Dom is a man with many secrets and she’s left trying to figure out just how deadly those secrets might be for herself.

The author did a great job making very distinct and real characters. Dom is both loving and secretive, leaving it hard to interpret for the reader whether he is all he seems to be, a devoted husband, or if there is something scarier lurking beneath the surface with all of the secrets he is keeping from Jane. From his dead first wife, to the disappearance of a boy named Elijah who he knew, and the fact that he won’t tell anything about either event to Jane. Then there’s Jane herself who is tenacious, relentlessly digging up these secrets and unwilling to let them go when he tries to dismiss or distract her from her questions. I loved that she was decidedly her own person and refused to be put into a domestic little box despite his attempts, and refused to give up on her passion of finding answers to true crimes and creating documentaries about them.

I was so paranoid about the other characters. The uncertainty that the author created about the motives of characters and the secrecy of past events had me properly hooked. I wanted desperately to know what had really happened and what caused them to be so unwilling to discuss it. I will so the storyline did drag a bit at times and I just wanted it to hurry along and provide answers because it felt like an endless search for clues to the past with not enough actual forward momentum. So at times I grew a bit restless while reading but the moments of payoff kept me coming back.

I did enjoy the read and the ending satisfied in providing all of the answers to questions raised throughout. The final couple of chapters did end a bit abruptly in my opinion, without a fully fledged feeling wrap up, it was more of a “answers have been given and boom it’s over” with an epilogue-like chapter that raised more questions than answered, but as far as thrillers go it’s a well written story that’s worth the read.

Rating

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.