Overall, I did enjoy this book! It was easy and simple to get into, nothing too complicated. What ruined it for me was the ending. I didn't find it very spooky either. After reading some reviews to see if I actually understood the ending, I saw a lot of people found it scary. There were ghosts and ghosts making people do things, but I guess it seemed far-fetched enough that it didn't really bother me. SPOILER: But that was the ending basically, that all these people were killed on this road and it's because of one girl who was murdered by her dad "by accident" and then after her ghost forced other people to kill other hitchhikers on the same road. I get it, it's a ghost story, so it can go sideways, but it just went a little too sideways for me. But I still enjoyed the story overall, and there were definitely times where I'm like, just get the hell out of that town. Even if the ghost is chasing you, just leave!! ( )

"Murder Road" has a wonderful start. April and Eddie, a young couple, on their honeymoon, are lost on a deserted country road at night. They stop to pick up a girl who is shuffling along the side of the road. Only when she's in the car do they see the blood and understand that's she's badly, perhaps fatally injured. Then the strangeness starts.

From the moment they picked up the girl, menace wrapped around April and Eddie like a malign fog and I knew I was reading a thriller with a wif of woo-woo as disturbing as the smell of decomp in a neighbour's basement. There was a threatening truck, seen only as accelerating headlights in the rearview. The young couple arrive at the hospital soaked in blood that is not their own and are treated not as rescuers but as suspects. There is something off about the quietly menacing way they are treated by the local police, as if they are being stalked, slowly and confidently. The police board them with a local woman who, it turns out, local legend says killed her policeman husband.

The creep factor continued to rise throughout the first half of the book. Some of that was because of the legend of the Lost Girl who is said to haunt the country road April and Eddie were on. Most of it was because I started to understand that no one, not even April, the new young bride from whose point of view the story was told, was who I'd expected them to be.

April has a dark past, a sharp edge to her tongue and a deep-seated distrust of the police. Eddie, recently discharged from the Army, doesn't trust his memory, his sight or his control over his own actions. The main detective has all the empathy and warmth you'd expect of a psychopath. His presence is oppressive and, in some ways, more threatening that the legendary Lost Girl.

By the halfway mark, I was sure that April and Eddie were going to be crushed in the investigation. Then something happened that lessened the pressure, the plot slowed and suddenly, instead of the grounded but undefined threat to April and Eddie from the police investigation, the couple were mired in a ghost story.

I struggled a little with April and Eddie's continued involvement but my investment in them kept me moving forward.

Then April, unreliable, secretive, potentially dangerous April, took centre stage, everything became more personal and the tension rose to an even higher pitch than before.

The struggle between April and the detective and the escalating threat from something supernatural that only April and I-think-I'm-hallucinating Eddie could see became so intense that I could only read it for short periods before it became to stressful to be fun.

The stress emanated not from the mystery of the murdered girl or the supernatural incidents but from April and the detective who circled each other like two starved rats in a bucket. For me, the stress was amplified because April was easy to empathise with but impossible to trust and the lead detective was so unpleasant that I found myself hoping he wouldn't make it to the end of the book.

By this time I was three-quarters through the book and I still had no idea where it was going except that everything was going to get worse.

The resolution, when it came, was satisfying an made sense in a woo-woo logic kind of way. It seemed to me that too much time was spent wrapping things up neatly at the end. It felt like the cool down at the end of a har cardio session - I could see why it was there but it wasn't much fun.

Overall, 'Murder Road' was an intense read that successfully combined a complex female character with a twisty plot, small-town menace, dark personal histories and dramatic and disturbing supernatural elements. ( )

Good hitchhiker serial killer mystery, though I have to think the only reason it was set in the nineties was to avoid the cell phone obstacle. Spooky, mysterious, and good character history woven in. ( )

As the novel begins, we meet newlyweds April & Eddie in 1995 en route to their honeymoon destination near Lake Michigan. They realize they have lost their way when they find themselves on a deserted stretch of road where they encounter a grievously injured hitchhiker, Rhonda Jean, whom they rush to the nearest hospital. Tragically, the young woman succumbs to her injuries and the police deem them persons of interest. It is revealed that Rhonda Jean’s death was not an isolated incident and several hitchhikers had been killed on Atticus Line in separate incidents over the last twenty years. Forced to stay back in Coldlake Falls as the local authorities investigate, Eddie and April embark on their own investigation into the town and the murders in an effort to clear their name.

I was intrigued by the premise Murder Road by Simone St. James. Atmospheric and suspenseful, this novel had a lot to offer. The paranormal element was interesting ( I don’t dabble much in this genre, but I do like the author’s way of incorporating the surreal elements into her plotlines!) and the sub-plots were well woven into the narrative which flows well. But after a strong start, I found aspects of the plot a tad too contrived to fully enjoy. While I can’t say that I disliked this novel in its entirety, guessing a large part of the “mystery” midway (it was rather obvious) left me less than engaged as the narrative progressed. I also found the outcome of one of the crucial plot points more than a tad underwhelming. I did enjoy the nineties' references, but somehow didn’t find the same integral to the story in any way. I have to admit that I found the supporting characters (The Snell sisters and Rose) more interesting than the main characters.

I paired my reading with the audiobook and I have to say that Brittany Pressley’s narration rendered this an entertaining immersion reading experience even though I wasn’t too taken with the execution of the novel overall.

However, I have enjoyed the author’s work in the past and hope to do so again in the future. ( )

Murder Road had a lot of the elements that I enjoy in murder mysteries, but I was somewhat disappointed in this latest book by this author. When I first started reading this author, I loved the mix of mystery / suspense / paranormal that could be found in the books, and found them creepy and gripping.The book did start off rather strong for me so I was hopeful at first, but then it got bogged down towards the middle and I started to lose interest. And the thing is, it wasn't that the source material was uninteresting, I think it was the way it was presented.

Newlyweds Eddie and April are the main characters in this book and I did enjoy their backstories. Both of them had some struggles in their lives and I found their perceptions of current events based on their backgrounds to be quite interesting; the whole concept that we can never leave run away from who we were is a running theme throughout this book and we have to accept that those experiences have shaped us into the people who we are today. There were a lot of repetitive thoughts and concepts though, and I got tired of April reminding us how beautiful she was even though it wasn't important to her. Really? I think the author was hung up on this concept and used 'the beautiful woman must be lying because she is beautiful' thing to the point of nausea. There really couldn't be any other reason why the police officer thought April was lying? Of course it had to do with the fact she was beautiful and was hiding something. Eddie's story fascinated me more than April's simply because I am married to a vet and understand the impact PTSD and being posted overseas can have on someone. I personally don't think enough is done for our vets so I liked that story line very much. I am definitely biased in that regard.

The story itself was actually interesting, but I wish the author had included more of the paranormal element to it, something that was very much lacking in this book. I think I was expecting something much more creepy, something with much more of a twist, but I didn't get that. I don't mind the police procedural aspect of the book as I like that kind of thing, but something paranormal thrown in would have been so interesting. I mentioned that I lost interest about halfway through the book, but I think it was the writing style, not the material, that was the cause.

Verdict
Murder Road definitely had some interesting elements to it, and there were some themes running through it that I liked. None of these things were fully developed or used in such a way to create that creepiness factor that is necessary to this type of book. There was little to no twist; in fact, I felt like there wasn't much of a denouement at all. Overall, while I didn't hate it, I didn't really like it either. If you are interested in reading this author, I recommend The Broken Girls. ( )