14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Requires suspension of belief..., November 26, 2007
Eve Renner sustained a gunshot wound upon discovering her childhood friend slain in a remote cabin, and the last face she saw before passing out was that of her jealous lover, attorney Cole Dennis. With evidence lacking, and Eve being an unreliable witness due to partial amnesia, he's set free after three months and told not to bother Eve, but he can't keep away from her. Despite a restraining order, he seeks Eve out after he is summoned to the house of her father only to find him murdered in the same manner. When more bodies pile up, all bearing different numbers tattooed on their foreheads, the police realize that they might have been hasty in trying to pin the first murder on Cole. All the victims have a history with now-defunct Our Lady of Virtues mental hospital, and there appears to be a link between Eve and the suicidal Faith Chastain, whose death figured prominently in Jackson's "Shiver".
You have to suspend belief that a high powered attorney can lose everything including the clothes on his back when he hasn't even been indicted, or that his lover can be so quick to forgive him, or that the same town can have a pious serial killer in their midst not once but twice in a single year (make that three times since the door has been left open for another sequel). My chief complaint was that the story is too close in plot to "Shiver," and that detracts from the story, as it gives it an all too familiar "been there, done that" theme, in fact, I thought a couple times there that I'd already read the story, particularly the setting and the police officers in charge. However, Jackson is a master at weaving an intricate plot (and knows her Catholicism), and I found myself digging in late into the night to discover the identity of the mastermind behind the killings.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Absolute predictability, February 28, 2008
This review is from: Absolute Fear (Mass Market Paperback)
"I'm livin' a soap opera," drawls Eve under her breath, as she descends the stairs to greet her lover, who is slaving over a hot skillet of bacon for their reunion breakfast. And Absolute Fear is a soap opera of a book, lengthy, repetitive, and so predictable. Incredibly sexy Eve, barely recovered from a terrifying murder attempt, hasn't the sense to 1) stay away from danger and let the police do their work, 2) stay away from the impossibly hunky Cole, whom she thinks may have tried to kill her, 3) stay away from the creepy abandoned psycho hospital where she grew up. The cops on the case, barely a year after another serial killer situation at the same institution, can't seem to hook up the clues that are screamingly obvious. Why they didn't raze that place after the first round is the biggest mystery in this clunker.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Just didn't work for me, August 2, 2007
"Cold-Blooded" and "Shiver", the previous two books in this series, were very good. This one, not so much.
Not enough info on:
*Eve's relationship with Cole before the shooting.
*What happened to Eve and Cole in the three months after the shooting.
*What really happened with Cole on the night of the shooting, because the few lines it was covered in were unclear.
Not enough development of the male and female leads. Ex: Did Eve work? If not how did she get her money?
As someone else pointed out why did Cole lose his house, car, job, money and possessions when he hadn't even been indicted yet? His attorney was a friend so he would have gotten a break on that fee and Cole was an attorney also so he would have been able to do a lot of the work on his own.
Now we have two women in the TSTL (too stupid to live), dumber than a box of rocks, don't have two brain cells to rub together category. Eve had found her friend brutally murdered with a tattoo carved into him, she'd been shot and almost died. Then her father was murdered in the same manner as her friend (also with a tattoo) and Eve has been targeted by the killer. Yet she went running around on her own, meeting a friend at a restaurant and then into a deserted insane asylum. TSTL
Kristi's dad is a cop and she's mad at him because he won't give her privileged details on a current investigation so she can write a true crime book. Kristi had been kidnapped, chained to a wall, and almost died because of the serial killer that had been after her. Yet there she is, a year or so later, wandering alone around the same insane asylum as Eve, not at the same time, taking pictures of the area where a nun had just been found also carved up and dead. TSTL
Other reviewers have brought up the fact that the insane asylum plot is getting really old and I agree; its way past time for it to go away.
Then there's the now dead priest who was taking advantage of women and fathering kids all over the place. This is just plain insulting! There have been cases of abuse by priests lately, but the vast majority of priests are good, spiritual people who believe in their calling. This part of the plot was particularly distasteful!
I realize New Orleans is not a huge city but it's not Mayberry so having all these people related to each other goes way past the bounds of being even slightly credible.
Fortunately I bought this book used!
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