Book review 📖

📜The Stranger At Black Lake
✍️Christina McDonald
📠Intrigue Ink Publishing
📚Mystery/Thriller, Fiction
🗓️Pub date: March 19, 2024

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✨Thank you @NetGalley and Intrigue Ink Publishing for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

✨Prequel to These Still Black Waters, The Stranger At Black Lake is a chilling read, where a violent attack is at the forefront of a seemingly sleepy town.

✨Jess and her husband, Mac, are new to the area of Black Lake. The lake is dark, creepy, and harbors stories of death. Jess meets another new resident, Annie, at a nearby coffee shop, and after exchanging numbers, they decide to meet up again.

✨ While Jess is out for a run around the lake, she happens to see Annie standing at the edge of the lake, incoherent and naked. What she thought were red shoes, are not in fact red, but covered in blood.

✨While Jess is led to a gruesome crime scene, Annie disappears. Jess is left wondering just who Annie really is, and the dangers that lurk in her new town.

✨This book definitely held my interest, is dark, terrifying, and bone-chilling.
I’ll be picking up this author’s sequel, These Still Dark Waters! Great book, a must-read!

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This novella is the prequel to These Still Black Waters . Jess, how she discovered her talent for investigation and went from a paramedic to being a detective. moving to a new home, making a new friend who she discovers naked and in shock and a murdered body upstairs in a house with a history of suicides and missing people. And a man, suffering with pain, disability and violent tendencies who is stalking someone, jess or ? . It is well written, suspenseful right away and introduces some likeable character and a disturbing one

The stranger at Black Lake is a short thriller novel revolving around a married couple who move out into a small rural town from New York City in the hopes of finding somewhere calmer and safer to begin building their family.

The wife is yet to find new work there so with extra time on her hands she decides to venture outdoors, where she meets a new friend who claims she is living in “the gingerbread house” that is notorious for its dark history of death, murders and restless ghosts.

A little while later she stumbles upon the scene of a murder at the exact same house, and when mysterious events unravel she lets her curiosity get the better of her and starts to investigate the dark past surrounding the home.

For a short story this was well written, interesting and engaging. Multiple POV allow the reader to try to puzzle together events from the past with current events in the present. The story concludes with all the answers wrapped up and explained nicely.

I liked the main character and the detective involved with the case and their budding friendship.

This is a prequel to these still black waters, which I haven’t read. You definitely don’t need to have read it to understand and enjoy this short story. But perhaps if I had read it I may have found more enjoyment in getting a back story to certain characters in this prequel? It’s hard to say without having read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and intrigue ink publishing for a copy!