SPOILERS AHEAD

Reading this book was like being beaten with a stick. It starts off very promising, style-wise, but the story and language both degenerate like crazy until by the last few chapters you're just thinking, "What? Wait, she got kidnapped by the psychopath and he's holding her hostage for a month and that's covered in, like, four paragraphs? Seriously, what?"

And even when it's good it's brutal. The heroine is an alcoholic relapsing after ten years of sobriety, and her dog gets put in danger constantly, and then - okay, I am a dog person. So as soon as I realized there was a dog in this book I immediately read the last page, because I was not going to carry on if the dog wasn't going to make it. The dog appears on the last page. Relieved, I read on.

Ha ha! Turns out the dog only appears on the last page as a figment of the heroine's imagination, because said dog has been KILLED, by the psychopath stalking the heroine, with a HUNTING KNIFE. I was all kinds of complacent there about the dog's fate, even when the warning signs started piling up, and then I got to the KILLING PART and made some horrible noise and burst into tears, and my husband looked over at me and said, without having to ask why I was crying, "But you said you knew the dog would be okay!" ARGH.

I know you're supposed to end the book feeling that the heroine is going to stay sober and that, spiritually, her dog is still with her. It's supposed to be hopeful. For all the crazy roads the plot took, this book was too real about despair and addiction, and I can respect that but I don't really enjoy emerging from a reading experience so emotionally bruised. And it is a policy of mine to not read authors who will kill canine characters (I'm quite serious). So no more Woodruff.