SON OF THE ENEMY by Ana Barrons

Publisher: Samhain

Date published: 25 June 2013

ISBN: 978-1-61921-572-6

Romantic Suspense

E-book

Reviewed by Helen

Weblink: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/son-of-the-enemy-p-7427.html

Obtained via publisher

 

John Emerson Daly’s father was convicted of murdering his mistress and has been in jail for the past twenty-three years. John missed his father desperately all that time, and was a delinquent teenager who acted out to cope with his loss, but finally he settled down as a psychologist with the FBI. Now his focus is to follow through on new evidence he’s found out, about the person who really killed his father’s lover.

Hannah Duncan then aged six, was in the room when her mother was murdered and was completely traumatized by the event. Her mind has blotted out all her childhood years. She’s now in charge of a school for troubled teenagers. But someone is stalking her, and the stalking is dangerously similar to something that happened to her dead mother.

The story revolves very strongly around the suspense and tensions of the two main characters, their troubled pasts and the way they attempt to deal with the present. Their emotions are fragile and volatile and both of them are very much into denying anything that doesn’t sit well with the past as they perceive it. There’s a lot of tension, surprises and fast-paced action in the story, which make it a true page-turner. There are a couple of places where I’d really advise readers not to be reading alone in a dark house late at night.

We also get quite a good feel for Hannah and John’s multilayered personalities, by the way they deal with the secondary characters in the book. There are some excellent thumb-nail sketches of the minor characters, and some clever unveiling of secondary characters as we meet them for a paragraph here or there during the book.  There are also some fun surprises that I really enjoyed.

The gradually unfolding attraction between the main characters is handled very well indeed, especially considering their past hurts and their higher than normal emotional stresses.

Additionally, the book is very clean editorially. I found only a couple of tiny errors which is excellent for such a long book.

Well worth reading indeed.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.