When Ava arrives at Brodie’s Watch, she thinks she has found the perfect place to hide from her past. Something terrible happened, something she is deeply ashamed of, and all she wants is to forget.
But the old house on the hill both welcomes and repels her and Ava quickly begins to suspect she is not alone. Either that or she is losing her mind.
The house is full of secrets, but is the creeping sense of danger coming from within its walls, or from somewhere else entirely?
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I'd like to thank Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and Transworld for my copy of The Shape of Night to review via NetGalley.
I've been a huge fan of Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series for years but hadn't read any of her standalone novels before so when Anne was looking for reviewers for her latest book I decided to sign up, and having finished reading The Shape of Night the one thing I can safely say is Rizzoli and Isles it's not! Having read the blurb I was expecting a bit of a haunted house/mystery storyline but things certainly took on more of an unexpected twist than I was expecting which typically wouldn't be my type of read.
From the outset it's clear that our main character Ava is running from something, she's escaped to coastal Maine on the premise of getting stuck into researching and writing her latest cook book but if she thought she could escape from her past then she's sadly mistaken. No sooner does she step inside Brodie's Watch then strange things start happening, at times she thinks it's her mind playing tricks with her, and maybe a fondness for drink could be playing a part in her delusions, but at others she can sense that there's someone else there watching her. I can tell you now as soon as the first strange event happened, I would have been long gone so she's a braver woman than me!
The murder/mystery element of the book comes into play after a woman's body washes up on the local beach and it's not long before we discover her identify and her links to Brodie's Watch. So why did she disappear as quickly as she had arrived, what happened to her and could Ava herself be in danger?
Ava was a character that intrigued me, I wanted to get to know the real her and find out about the events that had brought her to Maine but at the same time her woe-is-me attitude and the fact that she was avoiding those that obviously cared about her really frustrated me. I wanted her to face up to and deal with whatever demons she was running from as avoiding them would only make it harder for her in the long run to be happy and move forward with her life. Her cat Hannibal also deserves a honourable mention as he stole the scene at times, and certainly created paranoia for Ava when he started hissing at shadows in the dark.
There's no doubt that Tess Gerritsen is a skillful writer, whether it be in the crime genre which I'm used to reading or this book which I'm not actually sure which genre to classify it as maybe paranormal suspense/romance. And she certainly amped up the creepy tension in this gothic, atmospheric novel that I really shouldn't have read so late at night that it had me listening out for noises in my hotel room. But on the flip side there were some explicit scenes that I could really have done without... I won't go into any real detail other than to say it takes the idea of a friendly ghost to a whole other level!
The Shape of Night turned out to be much more of an eye-opening read than at first expected from Tess Gerritsen but it hasn't deterred me from reading another standalone novel from her in the future, although I'm hopeful she'll return to the crime storylines that I have enjoyed from her in the past.
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Thanks for the blog tour support Sharon xx
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