Expecting to Die by Lisa Jackson

Expecting to Die by Lisa Jackson

The menacing woods of Grizzly Falls, Montana, are not for the faint of heart. But for some, they’re the perfect setting for partying and pranks. They don’t know there’s a rapt audience amid the tangled trees, a killer with a different kind of game in mind, for whom the woods are dark and deep and perfectly deadly.

Some places earn their bad reputation through tall tales or chance. Grizzly Falls is different. Here, killers aren’t just the stuff of legends and campfire lore. Someone is in the night-time shadows, watching the local teens play around in the moonlit woods. Waiting for the right moment, the right victim. Waiting to take away a life.

Detective Regan Pescoli is counting the days until her maternity leave. Exhausted and emotional, the last thing she needs is another suspected serial killer. Especially when her daughter, Bianca, is swept up in the media storm. When a reality show arrives in town, the chaos only makes it harder for Pescoli and her partner, Selena Alvarez, to distinguish rumor from truth.

Another body is found and another. And as the nightmare strikes closer to home, Pescoli races to find the terror lingering in the darkness, where there are too many places to hide and countless places to die.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love series that are set in small towns and Grizzly Falls is one of those places where you come to feel like you know everyone there and could easily navigate the streets if you came to visit. It’s also the perfect setting for a book where a killer need a place to hide–with the forest and mountains and location out of the way of the modern world surroundings. The author takes full advantage of that and thrills her readers from beginning to end with “Expecting to Die.”

I’ve always had a thing for Lisa Jackson books because I know the suspense will be high and it will be hard to guess the ending, and this book is no exception to that rule. This novel has a pretty large cast of characters and gets more complex as the plot moves along, but is never confusing. I liked Bianca a lot in this book and although some of the subject matter could have gone awry and become worthy of an eye-roll, it never did. Lisa Jackson could turn just about anything into a solid hair-raising story, just as she proved with this book.

I’m a glutton for punishment. I love reading thrillers at night, when the house is dark, or when we are out in the wilderness somewhere camping and away from civilisation. This is just the kind of novel that would scare the living daylights out of me in such a situation (it did, at night, on the couch) and so if you, like me, want to go prematurely grey with worry over what is stalking you that you can’t see but can feel just beyond the tree line, this is the book for you.

In the end, this was a great book with a lot to recommend it. If you love stories that never stop and hardly slow down, surprise endings and characters that make you care what happens to them, this is a great book to choose. Read the rest of the series as well, they’re a lot of fun, too.

This review is based on a complementary copy from the publisher, provided by netgalley. All opinions are my own.