Amazon Horror Suspense Author A. Shockey Category:  Horror Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc. ISBN-10:  1609105982 Type: Fiction Pages: 322 Copyright: November 22, 2010 ISBN-13: 9781609105983 Horror Suspense Thriller... Ronni Parker doesn't believe in ghosts, but then, she's never met her mother... Ronni Parker doesn't believe in ghosts, but then, she's never met her mother... What really became of her? Was she the young girl raped and then driven mad by the loss of her baby? A tender, tormented soul locked away in a tiny room of a secluded cabin...did she commit suicide? It is the time of reckoning. Because the biggest lie ever told is that the dead bury their secrets. Excerpt 16 For the longest time, she stood there. Wondering. Trying to reason. Staring and seeing it, but unable to comprehend it. Nobody could move that fast. It wasn’t humanly possible. She’d had her hand on the doorknob for only a few seconds between the moment she heard the sewing machine stop, and the next, when she’d come into the room. Yet, someone had most definitely been in here. The proof was right in front of her. She stepped forward. Nerves jangling with emotions. Fear. Uncertainty. Confusion. Heightened awareness. She reached out with one hand and the emotional knot tightened.    Like a constricting snake, it squeezed and squeezed. Still, she could not stay her hand. Because sometimes seeing something drew a person’s touch, whether the touching was wise or not. And when the urge pulled hard enough, there was no escaping it. She removed the swatch of cloth from beneath the poised needle. Broke the thread. Held the material on her open left palm and with her right hand, lightly ran her fingertips over the raised stitching that formed the words sewn there. Ronni. Mine. The knot in her chest tightened a little more. She struggled to make sense of the sewing machine and its mysterious, unseen operator, and the equally disturbing and perplexing message clearly intended for her. The message was about her. Someone was staking a claim. On her. As binding in her mind as a written, signed contract. She was somebody’s mine. Like an object. Something up for grabs. She wasn’t flattered. Her skin crawled as if hundreds of tiny insects were scrambling up her back, to her neck and shoulders, and then down her arms. Using the pores of her skin as footholds for their grappling, scurrying feet. No, she was not flattered. She looked up. Searching the room visually while standing where she was on this side of the sewing machine. Her eyes saw no other person, but her brain was not fooled. Because the rest of her was sensing what her eyes were not seeing. Feeling with certainty; she was not alone in the room. Was it the girl she’d seen only moments ago from outside, standing at the front window, looking out and watching as she’d cut and collected the flowers? The girl who had vanished before she could get back inside? Where had she gone? And so quickly. Maybe to the cellar. From there, perhaps out, through the door at the top of the stairs. The one Jack used. And now, left in her wake, was this residual lingering of her presence. And this message sewn on the scrap of cloth. Ronni. Mine. Except the two did not add up. Not in a way that Ronni could compute using sane, logical reasoning. If the girl she’d seen at the window had also been in this room, and had sewn the message on the cloth, how had she gotten out of the room with the door shut and Ronni standing just on the other side of it in the hallway? It wasn’t physically possible. And yet…she’d heard the machine running. Then stop the instant her hand had touched the doorknob. And she was now holding the evidence. More bugs crawled over her skin. The creepy sensation was so intense this time it compelled her to leave the room.

Reviewed by Alice D. for Readers Favorite
Echo of Souls is the perfect book for this season of Halloween. Ronni Parker taking a leave from her company, has driven hundreds of miles across Florida to find her inheritance, a cabin nestled on Paloma Road in the backwoods land next to the Suwannee River. Raised by adoptive parents, Ronnie has been left her family's home by the grandmother she has never known. Ronni's lawyer, Mr. Saxton, warns her that the nearby townsfolk may not welcome her cordially, and Ronni finds truth in his words. Her birth mother apparently killed herself after Ronni was given as a baby to others to raise, and river dweller Jack, good friend to Ronni's grandmother, refuses to stay in the cabin after dark. Ronni senses a presence in the old cabin, but when she is nearly drowned in the bathtub, she knows there are unseen "presences" that might mean to harm her. Can old river-folk storyteller, Netta Jackson, help Ronni uncover those otherworldly beings?

Alishia Shockey has written an absorbing story that horror story fans will love. The plot holds true from beginning to end of the story. She does a first-rate job in revealing the identity of the ghost that haunts Ronni, leaving one word messages for her on the old sewing machine that runs itself. That Ronni's dead mother seems so loving, so welcoming, and then is totally lethal is a great piece of literary work. Characters such as Jack, Netta Jackson and Corbin Cox are well created and believable. This is a honey of a Halloween offering, a good read for any time of year. The wordy description at story's beginning is totally forgivable in light of the story to come.