Nicholas Grabowsky's Review Posted Here.

I tried breaking out of the horror genre with a mystery series. However, from the first novel on, I was informed by critics that I didn't make it. So I sent a hard cover copy to Nicholas Grabowsky, a world renowned horror writer who came upon my home page last year and asked me to send him something to read. Wow. He has me dead to rights. Here's a link to his review of Unholy Alliance. Nicholas also added a link to my publisher; directly to my Unholy Alliance site.To Nicholas, thanks so very much.
The reason I wanted a change was because I seemed to be stuck in a world where darkness ruled, where most of what I wrote--particularly concerning Satanic cults--was true . It followed me home; interferred in my personal life; my sleep. As Stephen King said, "The dark has teeth," and he was right. Nightmares weren't just nightmares, not when I was constantly being chased by a faceless man who I sensed was part beast. So I decided to make the change. But the transition failed in the sense that the darkness is still in me and I can't shake it. However, my horror novels were well received, so maybe this is a good thing.

Review by Nicholas Grabowsky (www.downwarden.com)

Author Dana Reed, when submitting this book to me, insisted it was not actually a horror novel but rather led me to believe it fell more on the lines of a detective thriller or merely a work of suspense.

A warning to all: this was clearly not the case, not entirely. I mean, suspenseful? By all means. A detective thriller? Certainly, even to many degrees by definition. With the utmost respect for those elements, however, readers with an appetite for gut-wrenching, in-your-face, relentlessly psychological and shamelessly graphic horror, Reed's Unholy Alliance comes through with guns blazing and the stench of a body count rising to high heaven in the aftermath.

In the streets of New York, a detective with a rattled past finds herself joining forces with a reporter harboring even darker demons from a life under an abusive father responsible for many of those demons as well as the loss of her leg. Together, they hunt down the Necrophiliac, a killer who harvests body parts from his victims to keep the ever-accumulating number of lifeless members of his "family" he dwells with fresh and free from decomposition. At the scene of each murder, he leaves behind a single glass rose. This poses as a problem for the reporter when he leaves a rose for her as well early on, a chilling indication that she is not only next on his hit list, but as we discover later that he desires her to be his bride.

Dana Reed has been down this literary road before, a veteran of this sort of thing with eight novels of horror as well as other works under her belt, and she has seen herself as a well-received teacher of writing and journalism. Unholy Alliance, I might add, is the first in a series that promises to escalate in intensity and to further establish its unforgettable mark in genre literature. Reed's skill and craftsmanship with the written word is enough to make for a vivid and frightening read when coupled with such a compelling storyline often lacking in today's overdone and overblown world of crime/suspense dramas.