This was a brutal gory romp!

A small backstory:

Penny and her husband, Pete have a bad accident, but then Penny wakes up in a barn strapped to a table and she doesn't know how she ended up there. Penny's husband Pete ends up being killed, but it is unknown to her what happened to him and all that occupies her mind at the moment is her unborn child.

When Penny finally sees that her captor is a young teenager by the name of Edna she tries everything she can on how to escape the cluthes of Edna without hurting her baby, but things do not always go as planned as what Edna wants, Edna gets one way or another and Edna wants the baby with or without Penny!

Thoughts:

This was a very brutal and violent story of what the character Penny has to go through to not only get free of the character Edna, but how far she is willing to go to fight for the survival of herself and her baby. The book is fast paced and it was not only a bloody/gory romp it was also steeped in psychological horror as well.

It has been awhile since I went on a quick reading romp of a Amy Cross book, but I found myself into almost 40% of the book within just a couple of hours as I could not put it down! I will have to say though that there were some unanswered questions that had me wondering what the answers were, but as with some books by Amy Cross there seems to be lots of questions with no answers.

The only other problem I had with the story is that it sort of turned twilight zone weird in the last half of the book which really notched up some more questions, but since nothing was explained I was just left wondering. Sometimes loose ends need to be tied up but I just put it down to sometimes with horror books things are usually left hanging with no explanation. Other than all my "moans and grumbles" the story was really good and gory, so giving this one four "Bloody Brutal" stars.

For more thoughts on this review, please see my blog:
https://booknookretreat.blogspot.com/2021/08/last-wrong-turn-by-amy-cross.html ( )

Sixteen years ago there was a car crash in the countryside near Kent, close to Wexham village, England. Three people were rescued by John, the patriarch of a reclusive family that tolerated no interaction with its neighbors. They did not live to wish they hadn’t been rescued. The husband and wife were fed to pigs. The badly damaged child, still an infant, had her head sewn back together by John with whatever home-made implements were at hand. She got a new name, Enda Clare. She became part of the family, a necessary part. The family needed girls. Last Wrong Turn by Amy Cross begins.

It is the present day. Two people on a journey, a married couple maybe on a vacation, the wife is pregnant, are going by car through a heavily forested area in the middle of the night on an unimproved road. There is a crash. The man and woman are knocked unconscious but are rescued. Not by John, he is now aged and a bit infirm. Enda rescues Pete and pregnant wife Penny. She takes them to her home, the farm, where John and Enda live. Enda has never seen a pregnant woman before. She doesn’t know why Penny’s stomach is so big. Pa (John) won’t tell her what is going on. She will just have to wait and see. She will take care of Penny as if she were a sister.

But what happened to husband Pete? Remember the pigs? Pete meets his fate early in the novel but Penny doesn’t know that. She only knows that Pete is missing. And she has other things to worry about, like giving birth. In this graphic depiction of the birthing progress, Enda becomes aware of where babies come from. She is still not quite sure of how they got in there, but she sees the final creative result. So now Enda might have a sister as well as a brother, although she will have to wait a while for the fully realized brother.

Penny is not on board with this plan. She wants to find Pete, clean up and take care of the baby, and get back to civilization. Enda intends to defeat this plan. In several pages of graphically described fight scenes, the reader has to admire Penny. She has almost no skin left on one hand. She is stabbed repeatedly, bludgeoned in the head multiple times but never stops resisting and attacking the stronger Enda until she is finally unconscious. Enda then surprises the reader by carrying Enda to an abandoned diner where she leaves Penny to be found and either treated or buried. But she keeps the baby.

Penny is saved, spends a lot of time in the hospital, tells her story to the police, and is not believed. Except for the one cop who remembers a time when another very similar situation occurred. That victim, Lindsay, spends a lot of time in a mental health facility. But Lindsay’s description of Enda and Penny’s description of Enda are too similar to be a coincidence. The search is on for the farmhouse, Enda, Pete, and Penny’s son, Hugh or Alistaire, the name dependent on which “mother” has the naming rights.

But no one can find the farmhouse. The search goes on for years. For most of the years, Penny is the only one searching but she will later be joined by Lindsay. The police have long given up allocating resources to the search. Will Lindsay and Penny together find the farmhouse?

Of course, they will. But what finally happens is the somewhat surprising ending and would be a spoiler if I revealed it here. So I won’t. But just a warning for the sensitive. The graphic violence found at the beginning of the novel goes on unabated at the end. This novel is not everyone’s cup of tea. Just look at the cover, the discerning reader should be able to figure that out. ( )