STILLHOUSE LAKE – Rachel Caine | Looking For a Good Book

Gina Royal, young and naive, thought she was living the ‘typical’ and expected life as a woman, married with two children. But then her life was completely upset when a drunk driver drove his car into the wall of her attached garage … to reveal a horror she never imagined. Her quiet, often absent husband was a serial killer and his locked room, now revealed to the neighborhood and the police investigating the drunk driver, the filleted body of a young woman hanging from chains in the room. And this wasn’t the first.

It’s hard to believe that she knew nothing about the horrors going on in her own home, and Gina was tried but acquitted. But plenty of people made up their own minds as to Gina’s role, and now she and her children are constantly on the run, changing their names and up-rooting their lives in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the vile internet trolls attempting to lynch Gina and her kids.

This is a thriller, and author Rachel Caine builds this story quite masterfully. Enough so that there were numerous times that I thought about quitting the book because it was making me quite uncomfortable. I suppose that’s what you want in a thriller, though.

Despite Gina’s overwhelming drive to look after her children and not trust anyone, I thought that she gave in much too easily to finally trust someone.

Caine provides us with three men who appear in Gina’s life all about the same time. The savvy reader will understand that one of these men is not to by trusted. But which one? We get a few red herrings and a 180° turn-about, but this all falls into the pretty typical material for a thriller of this sort.

I had guessed the outcome of each of the men perfectly, and even the reveal of an accomplice. I had not anticipated the very ending, but I was not expecting this to ‘be continued’ either. I was a bit disappointed in that aspect. 99% of the book stood alone as a single book, but with one sentence we get clear evidence that the story isn’t really over.

While I liked this, I’m not going to go on and read the rest of the series. But I might look for other books by Rachel Caine.

Looking for a good book? If you enjoy a thriller that will make you feel quite uncomfortable as you read it, then Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine is just the right book for you. You’ll likely squirm a bit.