Volume 1 In A New Series
ABOUT THE BOOK
New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton Novels had one of the most unique towns in crime fiction. Murder at Haven’s Rock is a spinoff, a fresh start… with a few new dangers that threaten everything before it even begins.
Haven’s Rock, Yukon. Population: 0
Deep in the Yukon wilderness, a town is being built. A place for people to disappear, a fresh start from a life on the run. Haven’s Rock isn’t the first town of this kind, something detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, know first-hand. They met in the original town of Rockton. But greed and deception led the couple to financing a new refuge for those in need. This time around, they get to decide which applicants are approved for residency.
There’s only one rule in Haven’s Rock: stay out of the forest. When two of the town’s construction crew members break it and go missing, Casey and Eric are called in ahead of schedule to track them down. When a body is discovered, well-hidden with evidence of foul play, Casey and Eric must find out what happened to the dead woman, and locate those still missing. The longer Casey and Eric don’t know what happened, the more danger everyone is in.
Since this is a spinoff of the Rockton Series, it probably would have been more meaningful if I’d read these books before Murder at Haven’s Rock, but it wasn’t necessary.
Casey and her husband Eric, who is a sheriff, are characters who met in Rockton where they were involved in a Yukon town that would serve as a secret refuge. They obviously believed in this idea enough to use Casey’s inheritance to fund a similar town, but with intentions of correcting the concerns that compromised Rockton.
When the contractor over the new project called Casey for help locating two workers who disappeared, it immediately caught my interest. Unfortunately, it didn’t continue as I hoped it would.
My Concerns
First, though I really like a quirky character with a personality, I found the contractor, Yolanda, to be annoying and rude. This in turn caused me to question Casey and Eric’s ability to take charge of their employees. (I realize there may have been a backstory in the previous books, but it still didn’t work for me.)
While the characters were somewhat interesting, they weren’t developed enough to make me want to continue the series.
The story plodded along and, unfortunately, the mystery wasn’t enough to make me want to finish the book, though I did.
Final Thoughts
The writing was good and the setting interesting, but the mystery fell flat with me.
You may want to give this series a try, especially if you like wilderness stories set in Alaska’s Yukon.
My thanks to St. Martins publishing for a copy of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelley Armstrong believes experience is the best teacher, though she’s been told this shouldn’t apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is however an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies.
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