Eve Seymour

HarperImpulse turn to the dark side with Vixenhead and it's a book that I absolutely whizzed through. It's so easy to read and hooks you from the start when Tom appears to have the perfect relationship with Roz yet vanishes without even saying goodbye. The catalyst being his photograph appearing in a magazine - what or who is he running from and why does he not want to be found? The answers are all within the intriguing pages of Vixenhead.

Firstly, I have to say that I loved the homage to Robin Hood with characters named Roz Outlaw and Tom Loxley. It did make me smile but if I thought Vixenhead was going to be a light-hearted read, I was so wrong. Roz and Tom seem to be so in love but then one day Tom disappears - he just packs up and leaves without a word. Roz can't understand what went wrong and turns into a bit of a Miss Marple as she hunts high and low for Tom. Roz isn't at all prepared for what she might uncover and it leads her into terrible danger at Tom's childhood home, the rather imposing Vixenhead.

I did rather enjoy Vixenhead; it is fast-paced and intriguing enough to keep you hooked and ensure that the pages turn as fast as possible. The only slight gripe I have is that the house, which the book is named after, doesn't really appear until the latter chapters and I would have loved to have felt my skin crawling as I was introduced to the imposing structure. I loved Roz's determination to get to the bottom of the Tom mystery and my reading pace increased in line with the dangerous circumstances at the end. Vixenhead is a good solid relationship-based thriller that held my interest throughout, it begs the question 'how well do you know the person you are sharing your life with?' I think it would make a good holiday read rather than the late-night spine tingler that I expected.

I chose to read an ARC and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.… (altro)

Before reading this book, I read through a few of the reviews and because so many readers were less than excited about it, I approached Beautiful Losers with a bit of hesitancy.



However, this is definitely one of my favorite books. Usually I can kind of reason why others might not like a book or why they would love something that I didn't, but in this case I really can't figure it out. Nonetheless, I can't say enough good things about this one.

Beautiful Losers is the story of a psychologist with a facial disfigurement. She leads a fairly happy life - great job, caring boyfriend - and yet she finds herself being targeted by a stalker. Who it is remains a mystery and her thinking is that if she ignores him, he'll just go away. That is, of course, until he harms someone close to her. Ultimately it comes down to whether she will uncover who is haunting her and trying to tear her down or will she give in and give the stalker what he wants in order to make him go away.



Very few books, even those that fall within the horror category, are able to give me chills like this one did. I know that writing in stalkers, essentially an invisible character, can be incredibly difficult and this one is so well done. This one was creepy, believable, and so well played out that I couldn't help but to root for his demise.

If you enjoy novels of suspense, especially those with stalkers, you're definitely going to want to get your hands on this one.

My Rating: 5 Stars
Would I Recommend: ABSOLUTELY YES!… (altro)

Clinical psychologist Kim Slade has intimate experience about body disfigurement. Superficially she’s a successful modern career woman who converted childhood trauma into something positive. Slade has a fashionable flat, a second seaside home, a loving long-term boyfriend, a close-knit circle of loyal friends, a snazzy set of wheels, rewarding work and supportive colleagues.

Oh yeah. She has something else, too. She has a stalker who wants to terrify her, isolate her, ruin her and then kill her.

On one level, Beautiful Losers works as a race-to-the-end novel of suspense. The author throws a stack of suspects into the mix. Neither the reader nor Slade knows who to trust, as suspicion switches from unknown strangers to her most intimate friends. Seymour maintains the mystery all the way to the final showdown, scattering red herrings and the odd dead body en route.

Then there’s way more going on in the subplots: body dysmorphic disorder; the life-rending implications of a rape accusation; the unspoken uncertainties of loving adult relationships; pushy parents and the anxieties they stimulate in their offspring; societal pressures to stay looking attractive into older age – almost every chapter repeats the book’s motif: there’s more to this than meets the eye. Slade’s personal uncertainty has the most resonance. She struggles to define herself as an individual. Is she dependent on her lover? Can she only be happy within the confines of that relationship? She just has to stay alive and out of jail to answer any of those questions…

Slade has potential to be a powerful protagonist. She’s an intelligent, insightful woman with the head-shrinking expertise which should make her ideally equipped to size up and sort out a deranged, disturbed opponent. But she spends much of the time on the back foot, very much in the role of bewildered, out-manoeuvred victim. She could’ve out-thought her stalker but instead reacts without engaging her intellect – deleting emails, disposing of vital evidence, denying her peril rather than facing it full on. However, I appreciate that there’s an entire sub-genre of crime novel which demands ‘realistic’ reactions from its protagonists. And I guess most people would simply fall apart in this situation – we can’t all be Lisbeth Salander.

There are several chapter conclusions which seem to signal a forthcoming change of direction, a new determination in which Slade rejects the role of passive victim and takes the fight to the enemy. My spirits would lift at these, only to plummet a few pages later when she returns to the same pattern of oddly inappropriate, banal, bourgeois behaviour.

So it’s an absolute tribute to the writing that, despite how little I liked her, I was fascinated by Slade’s decline into distrust and disorder. I was intrigued by the potential identity of her tormentor, and keen to discover how the parallel plots involving a mid-life crisis, older woman and a neurotic, anorexic youngster were resolved. For me, the master-stroke involved Slade’s relationship with her lover and how rapidly she became convinced that he’d betrayed her. Who do you trust?

This is a complex novel which aims to incorporate weighty contemporary themes into a page-turning thriller. It struggles in places to realise that ambition, but the pages sure do fly by. Beautiful Losers is listed as being the first Kim Slade thriller. Hopefully in the second, her intellect and grit will play a greater role.
7/10

There's a more detailed review over at:
https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/beautiful-losers-suspense-t...… (altro)