Joining a cult is easy, getting out alive is another story.
Two years after the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Amanda Reid, the family’s wealthy matriarch hires Toronto PI Samantha McNamara to find her daughter. Sam hopes that the case will distract her from her sister’s recent murder, but she quickly realizes that things are not as they appear in the secretive Reid family. Someone will do anything to keep her from finding Amanda and exposing the truth. When her investigation leads to a cult that recruits adolescent girls, Sam must find a way to unravel the family’s sinister tapestry and outsmart a psychopath. As the storm of the century shuts down emergency services, Sam puts her life on the line to protect the only innocent player in a deadly game.
The betrayal, blame, and lies that twist through this dark thriller will keep readers on the edge of their seats.
Professional Reviews
Joseph Hirsch, Author of Flash Blood
This is a solid debut for Fraser. The plot, in brief: A frigid matriarch and her henpecked husband live in the Canadian countryside. The couple are well-off, with one daughter who is a successful novelist, and another daughter with a penchant for religious fundamentalism, the latter of whom disappeared a couple of years back.
Enter Detective Sam McNamara, a tough female P.I., who is freshly returned from a headline-grabbing case involving a serial killer called "Incubus." She is hired by the father of the disappeared girl (and she is likewise despised by his wife), and her investigation leads her down a dark path, to a foreboding sanctuary where bodies and secrets are buried in abundance.
This is a deftly plotted novel that kept me reading and guessing until the end. My only gripe (and it's a minor one) is that the cast is a smidgen too large, especially re: a subplot about a suicidal musician. That's an ecumenical complaint, however, and, without giving anything more away, I was excited to discover at the end of the novel that a sequel is almost certainly assured.
Jerry Lowenstein, an octogenarian and a nice guy, has written a fantastic mystery/ suspense novel that takes place just after WW2 on and near Bikini Atoll. He actually witnessed an atomic bomb test. Can you imagine that?
