Simone St. James knows how to craft taught thrillers with supernatural, spooky overtones. Her novels often blend elements of crime and horror seamlessly, which is where Murder Road lands and makes for a perfect Hallowe’en/Spooky Season read.
July 1995. April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn. They’re looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon. When they spot what appears to a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help. But not long after the hitchhiker gets into their car, they see the blood seeping from her jacket and a truck barreling down Atticus Line after them.
When the hitchhiker dies at the local hospital, April and Eddie find themselves in the crosshairs of the Coldlake Falls police. Unexplained murders have been happening along Atticus Line for years and the cops finally have two witnesses who easily become their only suspects. As April and Eddie start to dig into the history of the town and that horrible stretch of road to clear their names, they soon learn that there is something supernatural at work, something that could not only tear the town and its dark secrets apart, but take April and Eddie down with it all.
In the summer of 1995, Newlyweds Eddie Carter and April are on the way to their honeymoon destination, a meager resort town when they get detoured for reasons unexplained on the dark country road known as Atticus Road. They see a hitchhiker along the dark road and decide to pick her up. The learn her name: Rhonda Jane and all she can really say “I’m sorry, he’s coming.” When Eddie and April they discover she’s bleeding they rush her to the hospital only to learn that she dies shortly thereafter. As a result, their honeymoon is slightly delayed as can happen when people are “parties of interest” when a person dies under mysterious circumstances.
April and Eddie are force to stay in the very small country town of Coldlake Falls while the investigation commences. The police bring them to the small bed and breakfast of Rose, whose deceased husband Robbie also served on the police force of Coldlake Falls. The young couple find Rose a tough nut to crack, and the police an even tougher group of people to crack. Outside of one young officer – himself not exactly part of the police force’s inner circle – April and Eddie are very much treated like suspects, with every word and action being questioned.
What often makes stories like this – ghosts and tales of hauntings – are the characters. St. James has really given readers two complex characters haunted by their pasts in Murder Road. I’ve said in several reviews (and it is pretty much a staple in ghost stories) is that the characters often bring their own hauntings to the haunted settings. I won’t go into too much detail about Eddie and April’s past lives, except to say that Eddie was in the military and that April was … a drifter. St. James weaves a believable while almost fairy-tale backstory to their meeting and romance. But there are always secrets and secrets between people who are married don’t stay buried for long.
Atticus Line, the Murder Road of the title, is most definitely haunted. Rhonda was not the first person whose death was a result of traveling Atticus Line or happened on that dark road. Mysterious deaths going back to the 1960s are associated with Atticus Line. St. James admirably allows her characters to not be stubborn (too much) and believe in the ghostly elements in which they are embroiled. The haunted hitchhiker and haunted road are great trope of the horror genre. Hell, there’s a fairly (locally) famous haunted road* in New Jersey where I live so it is a familiar element on which to build a story; St. James takes that idea and really knocks it out of the park. Again, I’ll put that success down, in large part, to the well-drawn characters. April and Eddie don’t always make the best decisions and both of them have a tendency to not share their personal histories of each other, at least the life they lived prior to knowing each other. Rose is a delight of a character, whose matter-of-fact, no-bs attitude provided some humor to balance out the spooky elements.
Spooky elements, empathetic characters, twisty plot elements, make for a fun, enjoyable novel. The novel is perfectly paced and is the perfect length. Like I said at the top of this review, Murder Road is a damned fine Hallowe’en (or anytime) read.
* My wife and I ran a half-marathon on that road and it was interesting, to say the least.
Recommended.
© 2024 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | March 2024
https://www.simonestjames.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
