Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Afraid of the Dark by James Grippando

To be honest, I wanted to read Gone Again, the 12th book in the series, because of Lectus' review. But, the NLB e-Reads programme didn't have it, so I borrowed Book 9 because the title sounded interesting, and I really wanted to see if this could work as a standalone.

Afraid of the Dark starts with the "innocent girl gets killed" scene, but with a slight twist - there's someone at the scene, and they have the name of the killer. And then it goes from bad to worse. A few years later, Jack (the hero of the story), takes on the case of a gitmo prisoner, who turns out to be the missing suspected killer, who is then killed, and really, the story just gets more confusing from there on.

Because the book started with Vince (the cop that found the girl and then was blinded), and the accusation of Jamal (the gitmo prisoner) as the killer, I was unsympathetic to Jamal for most of the book, even though he had a pretty solid alibi. I guess that's how powerful dying testimony can be. Anyway, I had immense sympathy for Vince and Chuck (the father of the victim), and didn't really get what Jack was doing.

And despite the fact that this series is about Jack, he was not my favourite character. In fact, he seemed to just get in the way of other characters, which I guess is a good thing, but didn't really affect the ending anyway. Or perhaps he's there because of the story with his FBI fiance, Andie (Andie is awesome, by the way).

Still, I gobbled up this book in two days. The previous book was one that I couldn't finish, so I really loved the fact that this kept me turning page after page. The chapters are pretty short too (about four or five pages on my iPad), so it was easy to fit in a chapter or two here and there.

I will definitely be looking out for other books in the series. I mean, if they're all this gripping, I have nothing to lose.

1 comment :

  1. Arggg so sad you got this one instead :-( and that it was bad.

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