Eddie and April are newlyweds. They are on their way to honeymoon but Eddie takes a wrong turn. On the loney road in the middle of nowhere is a young girl. Eddie pulls over to see if she is OK and does she need a lift anywhere. Things start to go wrong from this point. There is a local legend about that same road. The Lost girl roams and if seen you could end up dead.

I have read The Sundown Motel and didn't enjoy the book very much but when I saw my local library had this book I thought I would give the author another chance. I enjoyed this one so a lot more.

I had a fun time reading this book. The story was interesting as it followed Eddie and April and what happens after they pick up the girl. The story flowed easily and there was a twist towards the end which I didn't guess. I did think the ending went into thrillerland a little bit but it didn't spoil the story.

I did really like the characters of the Snell sisters and thought they added to the story running around like two Nancy Drews. It would be nice seeing them having their own story.

This book is rated as an horror but I would say its more of a mystery/ thriller with a ghost thrown in. I didn't find the story particularly scary or spooky at all but enjoyed the fact there was a ghost. In true horror form though you don't take a wrong turn and you don't stop to pick up a stranger.

I quite enjoyed this book enough to read more by the author in the future. ( )

We have a perfect blend of romance, mystery, and horror with this one. We first encounter Eddie and April who are newlyweds as they're trying to figure out who really murdered Rhonda Jean... the hitchhiker they tried to save and take to the hospital. They’re stuck in the small town of Coldlake Falls, Michigan, (see my note at the bottom of this review) ... and soon find that it is generally thought to be a ghost that is killing hitchhikers. Getting to following Eddie and April through this mystery was fun...plus we got to see how their relationship and their secrets, they seemed to have a lot of secrets, played out. Now...the ghost. We eventually find out who she is...or "was" as the case may be, later on in the story. As a living human being she was awful...mean..., vindictive...so it was no surprise that she wasn't any different now that she's a ghost. For some reason, she is now killing hitchhikers. Her actions made no sense to me, but it did make a fairly interesting storyline, but I kept wondering why she didn't just kill people that were like the person who killed her? We did eventually find the answer to that question. I also thought it was interesting how the murders all took place and what happened afterwards. I really like this author and believe I have read everything she has written...and I did like this one, just not s much as some of the others. If you like ghost stories and mysteries with a little fright and a little romance combines you will find this one fill the bill. ( )

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. ( )