Swerve by Vicki Pettersson
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a very medium-book for me.
it’s a solid premise – a nurse and her surgeon fiancé are driving through the las vegas desert on their way to his wealthy and snooty mother’s home for a fourth of july party when they pull over into a deserted rest stop so kristine can change out of her scrubs. already anxious because she has a fear of dark, confined places after a scarring childhood experience, kristine is completely terrified when a man enters the restroom and shoves a knife at her through the crack in the door. after a struggle in which she is knocked out, she regains consciousness to find that daniel is gone, the car and his cell phone abandoned.
his phone begins to ring, and when she answers it, kristine is confronted with a horrible situation – daniel has been abducted, and if she ever wants to see him again, she is going to have to prove her love by taking part in a very specific game of cat and mouse that will take her through the desert and into a series of gruesome situations, many of which seem to be tailored to her own fears and discomforts.
the first half of the book is driven by the game and trying to figure out who is behind it. in the second half, we know the identity of the kidnapper, and it shifts to pure survival.
the book has great movement – there’s a realistic frenzy to it as kristine falls into all the traps left for her and begins to realize the scope and intricacy of the setup, and all the consequences even if she does live through it. there will be many dead bodies left in her wake, but she’s operating on a killer’s tick tocking countdown, and if she pauses, daniel is going to die.
the first half is fine – there’s nothing extraordinary about the writing, but no one reads serial killer novels for their luminous prose. it’s got a good energy, and kristine is a sympathetic heroine – she loves her man, she faces her fears with determination, and her past – revealed throughout the story – makes it clear she is a survivor. there’s a great deal of graphic violence and theatrically staged murders, which is the only thing keeping me watching hannibal and the following, so i dug that, and it’s a perfectly good page-turner that isn’t intellectually taxing.
cue the second part.
View Spoiler »and that’s fine – it’s a perfectly good vacation read, and all that blathering is just me being a noodge. because you’re already deep in the land of the unreal when reading a book whose central drive is such a perfectly-calibrated scavenger hunt of murrrrrderrrr and horror. if you like serial killer books with very involved scenarios, lots of gross, bloody bits, or any of these movies, you will probably dig this.
a solid three stars cats
