Customer Reviews

Deadly Vision

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This review refers to "Deadly Vision" by Rick R. Reed

What would it be like to be the harbinger of death? Curse or gift? Cassandra D'Angelo is about to discover things she'd rather not. Single mom of 7 year old Max, Cass faces the pressures of raising her son alone, of living down a reputation for being a bit on the wild side in her younger days(something her mom never lets her forget) and providing a safe environment for him. So when little Max doesn't turn up on time for dinner, Cass panics and searches the small town of Summitville on the banks of the Ohio River. The neighbors always watch out for each other, and nothing really bad ever happens here, but Cass can't help but picture her little guy laying hurt somewhere in the nearby woods waiting for some help. A thunderstorm approaches, but Cass' motherly instincts won't let her stop looking. A crash of thunder and flash of lightning are the last thing Cass hears, as she is struck on the head by a falling tree branch.

Cass awakens 2 days later in a hospital bed. All is well with little Max, but after seeing the picture of the victim of a missing young girl splashed on the small town newspaper, Cass gets a picture of her own. The girl is not just missing, she's dead and Cass' brain flashes on a horrific death. The images don't stop there, and her visions give her the feeling of one very disturbed killer. She tries to warn the police, who can hardly believe her, she can hardly believe herself.

There are families out there who are desperate to know what happened to their children. Cass feels she must tell them. Putting her own well being on the line, she tries to help. Ian, the very deranged psychopath who kills at the whim of 'The Beast" who told him to(shades of Son of Sam) wants to put to put a stop to Cass. And what better way then through her own child? The race against time is on, can Cass save Max from this monster? Will anyone believe her? Can she conjure up the visions needed to find him, or rely solely on her motherly instincts?

It's a heart pounding, page turning ride from the mind of master horror/thriller story teller Rick Reed.
The first chapter, although a bit disturbing in it's content, gives the reader a look at the villain we will be dealing with. Reed's descriptive storytelling chills and sets the tone, but draws the line at not becoming overly graphic in situations that may be all to real. He brings characters to cheer and characters to fear. He draws the reader in and makes them part of the setting as well as the race against time. Everything is tied up neatly at the end - well almost everything - could there be a sequel in the works Mr Reed?

Often when I pick up a book by an Author I like, I sometimes find myself disappointed that the 2nd or 3rd book did not live up to my expectations. Not so with Rick Reed's stories. My expectations are exceeded each time. Each new one is a fresh story and the writing becomes more and more seasoned. This is the third I have read and I always find myself wanting to warn the characters. I am also always so impressed with how he gets into the heads of the characters. I was amazed at how Cass' actions as a worried mother were so real. The other two, if you are looking for some great thrills and chills are IMand In the Blood(see my reviews for book details). You should know that these three stories also deal with gay themes(and in the case of In The Blood - Vampires) and if that is something that would bother you, well, trust me when I say that you'd be missing some great thrillers, and fans should not pass this author by.

So move over Sylvia Browne, Cass D'Angelo is on the job! Another fine thriller from Rick Reed.
Keep an eye on your kids and...enjoy the read....Laurie

P.S. How come psychics never win the lottery?

Just a glance at the reviews already written showed that enough people have already given a run-down of the plot, so instead I'll just point out a few warnings/opinions.

The author is definitely talented; the writing was strong and the story kept me on the edge of my seat.
However, don't get the book expecting it to be a romance, because as far as the two women concerned, that plays a very very tiny part in the story.
The book is full of horror, violence, depraved men, and many sickening allusions to rape.
I expected a romance mystery type thing, but this veers closer to something like Silence of the Lambs.
It wasn't what I was expecting, so it took me off guard, but if that's the kind of story you were hoping for, you won't be disappointed.

This isn't to say the book is horrible and should be avoided; just a fair warning of its darker contents.

Cass D'Angelo lives a regular life in small town, Ohio, with her seven-year-old son, Max. She works at a popular diner and has little unusual going on in her life except, initially, the lack of a girlfriend. Her whole life changes, however, after being struck on the head during a storm. When she wakes up in the hospital, she discovers that she's acquired psychic powers, specifically the ability to visualize the grisly deaths of local girls who have recently begun disappearing.

The killers are an insane, but handsome, psychopath and his smitten and spectacularly confused girlfriend. We find out very quickly that they worship a devil-like entity, "The Beast," and when they discover that Cass has directed the police to unearth one of their victims, they go after her and her family.

Like Charlaine Harris's Harper Connelly character, Cass D'Angelo is a psychic character who's fascinating to read about. She's thoughtful, smart, and capable. Unlike Harris's character, who travels around to use her gift, Cass is mostly happy and settled in her Ohio home and committed to family, friends, and her community. That makes her deadly visions and horror over the sick murders even more palpable. Everyone is at risk, even her own son.

Reed gives us alternate chapters from the perspective of the twisted killer's girlfriend and of our increasingly-stressed heroine. His secondary characters, particularly Cass's mother and Cass's journalist girlfriend, are lively, interesting, and essential. His use of tone, pacing, and atmosphere is masterful. A natural born storyteller, this author does an excellent job showing Cass's increasing panic in the face of the killers' single-minded murderous intent. With every page, the reader's tension level rises until the wild climax. At times graphic, always descriptive, and endlessly suspenseful, this novel takes you on a rocky ride through horror and anxiety. Will the killers be thwarted? Will Cass live to see another vision? Will she lose the one she loves the most?

Highly recommended for all who enjoy heart-pounding suspense, horror, and good old-fashioned fright within an expertly constructed narrative. ~Lori L. Lake, Midwest Book Review

Hot on the heels of his enjoyable gay serial killer novel - last year's "IM" - Rick Reed returns with another gripping thriller, "Deadly Vision." Reed is quickly developing his own unique formula that blends suspense, fast-moving narratives, fully-realized gay characters, and a touch of the occult. His seeming bid to become a gay hybrid of James Patterson and Dean Koontz will not be lost on readers with this latest offering.

Cass D'Angelo, single mother to seven-year-old Max, is toiling away as a waitress in a small, depressed river town in Ohio. When Cass goes off after Max when he wanders off one afternoon during a thunderstorm, she runs afoul of a lightning strike and a falling tree limb. She awakens days later in the hospital - relieved to find Max safe - and discovers that the resulting concussion has left her with a newfound psychic ability. Before you can say Psychic Friends Network, Cass receives disturbing images of several local girls gone missing - their grisly fates playing out behind her mind's eye. Fearing more deaths, the reluctant psychic reaches out to the police and to one of the missing girl's parents - all of whom are skeptical. But when the father of a second missing girl begs Cass' help in finding his daughter and her decomposing body is found along the Ohio River banks, Cass finds herself the center of unwanted attention from a pair of devil-worshipping killers desperate to find out how she found their carefully hidden grave. It's here that the story kicks into even higher gear with a kidnapping, a manhunt, and - to a lesser extent - hints of a budding romance with a sympathetic female journalist.

As in "IM," Reed again opts to tell his story through multiple points of view. And, again, it works surprisingly well even when minor characters like Cass' mother get their chance at the storytelling bat. Laying out the actions and motives of your villains for readers is a tricky proposition - give too much and risk predictability at the expense of the suspense. But Reed expertly walks the tightrope between disclosure and omission, crafting passages told from the killers' perspective that are appropriately chilling and give just enough away to readers so that their acquired insight translates into dread when the action switches back to Cass and company. It's foreboding at it s finest with readers left muttering, "If you only knew what I know" at the book itself.

Reed also imbues "Deadly Vision" with a strong sense of setting, creating in Summitville a bleak tableau of working class hardship. One gets a strong sense of inevitability for the fictional denizens of the town, like they surrendered master status of their own destinies somewhere between unplanned pregnancies and factory closings. He nails the idea of familiarity and disconnection as analogous functions of small-town life:

"When Sheryl McKenna's mother opened the door, Cass felt as though she had already seen her. And maybe she had. Summitville was, after all, a small town. She could have passed the tired-looking woman on the street downtown, or served her in the diner. The woman stared at her with bright gray eyes, looking her over as if Cass were something she had discarded in the yard that had managed to make its way back to the porch. Mrs. McKenna was small, with no fat on her bones; she looked almost skeletal. Her skin was weathered, the result of too much sun, too much smoke. Her skin, combined with straw-like bleached blonde hair and hard eyes made her, Cass was sure, look older than her years. She held a cigarette in her hand, and the smell of tobacco smoke came out of the house in a wave when she opened the door."

Unlike "IM," the lesbian romance is relegated to the background here, never even a glimmer of possibility until the third act - and even then it's only alluded to in a near future. This is the novel's only misstep - and a slight one at that - and an area where Reed missed an opportunity for deeper emotional investment in the reporter character of Dani Westwood. The lack of romantic connection to Cass keeps her at arm's length for much of the action, consigning her to stock character status.

The novel's supernatural elements are handled quite well, with Cass' understanding of her precognitive abilities evolving gradually over the course of the book and never coming off as forced or over-the-top. Only toward the end when Cass encounters the spectral vision of one of the victims does one get the sense that they're smack dab in the middle of an episode of "Cold Case" or "The Ghost Whisperer" - and that's either criticism or commendation depending upon your level of tolerance for either of those shows.

The literary equivalent of a hybrid vehicle, "Deadly Vision" powers forward on a combustion of supernatural suspense, murder mystery, and breakneck thriller. With psychics and serial killers rendered with the same deft hand in a propulsive narrative likely to increase respirations, it takes no psychic ability to see that Rick Reed is headed for the top of the suspense class.

Summitville is the typical All-American small town: a hard-working populace, local diner with great burgers & fries, friendly faces on every street. That's why it surprises everyone when local youth begin to disappear without a trace; the sudden emergence of an evil presence among them quickly alarms the unsuspecting townfolk and disrupts the burg's overall sense of calm and peace.

One of those unsuspecting folk: Cass D'Angelo, diligent single mother struggling to provide for her seven year-old son, Max. When Max wanders away from home one night, Cass ventures out to retrieve him, but the sudden onset of a raging thunderstorm soon lands her in the hospital - thanks to a blow to the head from a tree branch struck by lightning, rendering her unconscious. When she awakens, Cass becomes aware of a new gift: the ability to receive visions of people, places, and things, combined to form deadly scenarios of what could be.

Shortly thereafter, her visions begin to assist in the discovery of the whereabouts of the abducted children; however, when her newfound ability draws the unwanted attention of the sinister parties responsible for the abductions, Cass is left to wonder if the visions are less a blessing and more a curse - especially when they ultimately endanger both her and Max's lives.

A superb storyteller of suspenseful tales, Rick Reed delivers again with Deadly Vision. In what has become his signature, unique style, Reed presents a fast-paced, action-packed page-turner, and even manages to poke subtle fun at small-town politics along the way. Interweaving drama, wit, and intrigue, Deadly Vision is an entertaining read from a proven scribe with increasingly impressive literary credentials.

An engaging tome, Deadly Vision will surely satisfy Reed's expansive base of readers, and is likely to add quite a few more names to the bunch.

Cassandra "Cass" D'Angelo is a single Mom just trying to get by in Summitville ("just 45 minutes from Pittsburgh") when Max, her seven-year-old son wanders off during a thunderstorm. When she goes looking for him, there is a lightning strike and a tree branch conks her on the head, putting her in the hospital. It's there, that she discovers that she had died, and was brought back to life, and like Stephen King's Johnny Smith (in "The Dead Zone") Cass discovers that she has psychic powers.

She starts having visions and she realizes a recently missing girl, the sixteen-year-old wild-child Sheryl McKenna, is dead and that Cass has had a vision as to where she is buried. These visions are becoming unbearable, and she makes the plunge and goes to the McKenna household to talk her parents. Well, this goes badly for everybody involved. McKenna's parents are a pair of sanctimonious sods, one an ex-party girl, and the other a religious drug user and child rapist, and Cass has to flee the house after Sheryl's mother gets violent. It goes equally, although less dramatically, bad when she goes to the police to report her visions. However, the father of Lucy Plant, the first girl to disappear, hears from Sheryl's mother about Cass and contacts her on the possibility that Cass might be able to find his daughter. Long story short, she does, and in doing so she draws the attention of washed up, and never was Danielle "Dani" Westwood reporter who sees Cass as her ticket out of Summitville. The hoopla that Dani brings down on Cass also gets the attention of the killers.

And the killers are a man/woman pair. The first being Ian, and he's the dominant, a psychopath who's created his own delusional god, and the other is the passive Myra Hindley, or the ex Penny Landsdale, a one-time high school misfit, who was "rescued" from obscurity and remade into Ian's lover, follower, and partner-in-crime.

Cass's story takes place over only a couple of days as while Dani is bringing down a media circus on Cass, Ian & Myra are stalking Cass. Then the two kidnap Max and all bets are off as Cass has to face the limitations of her powers as she & Dani try to track down the killers.

There was a lot here that to like. Such as the this novel's whole working class ethic, there is no professional investigator here. Cass isn't independently wealthy, and is struggling to keep her job while all of this is happening. She's a waitress in a dying town and is just trying to get by when these two maniacs set their eyes on her as their next victim. And while much is made of Dani on the cover copy, she has only a marginal role later in the novel. Another thing for me to like was that Reed didn't clutter up his novel with an unnecessary romance as most commercial bestselling novels do.

On the other hand, except for Cass and Myra, Reed does little more than sketch out his characters, some of which (like the McKenna's) take up space but who either eventually go nowhere, or have to work hard to be two-dimensional.

A good instance of a lost opportunity is Ian. Ian is a dominating force in this novel, but despite Reed making this a multi-perspective novel; he never bothers exploring Ian's character. All that we will ever know about this crackpot is what we can gather from observations from Myra, a character whose passive characterization is inconsistent at best. And why isn't more done with Cass's parents? Her moralistic and small-minded mother thinks that Cass is an addled drug user, although no evidence is ever submitted to this fact, while Cass is the apple of her Dad's eye. There should be interesting dynamics there, but Reed barely touches on them.

Another problem is, despite the fact that EVERYBODY seems to be a chain smoker, is despite this novel being published by a gay oriented publishing house, and despite having three lesbian characters, nothing is done with it. Cass's lover became a junkie and fled Summitville for the big city lights, Dani WAS a junkie and IS an alcoholic and who drove her lover away, and Marion Hartley, Summitville's only female police officer and chief detective had her lover die, and all three celibates lost their lovers YEARS ago. This makes the character's lesbianism seem more like a marketing tool to get this novel published in the small presses, and nothing more.

Now, Cass's psychic vision's only work if she can see or feel something from the victim, but Reed violates this rule late in the novel giving us a deus ex machina just so he can end his story.

And what is it with the Prologue? In which a haunted woman is shown finding another couples lost (and dead) child. How does this even feature into the novel? Is this Cass's future? Is this a set-up for a future novel? If so, why does it give the impression that everything in the novel will go badly for Cass?

I'm giving this novel only three stars because it could have been so much better. Cass is a good character, and this novel might make a good movie, but weak characterization and plotting otherwise help bring it down. On the other hand, I was never bored. I do have to ask, WHY do so many print-on-demand books have to have such crappy covers? "Deadly Vision" is stuck with one the more mediocre covers that I've seen lately. The quote that forms the title of this review shows how good Reed can be when he wants to, as this sentence can be seen to have two similar but different meanings.

The story was great. It definitely held my attention, and it was very well written.

Unfortunately, there were a few glaring issues that stopped me from LOVING the book. I'll preface by saying: I judge a book by how well it keeps me in the story and removes me from my everyday stresses and reality. Deadly Vision had two main gripes that ruined the flow for me and reminded me that I was just reading a book, and it sort of took away from that 'immersive experience' that I rely on.

#1 A character can only "bite their lip until they tasted blood" so many times before the repetition is played out.

#2 I don't know if the paperback version is better than the Kindle translation, but there were a few syntactic errors that killed it for me (no pun intended). An error or two over the course of 300+ pages is one thing, but more than five is unacceptable. It would only take a proof-reader one read through to pick up some obvious issues (example: one of the character's last names changed suddenly, but only in one page of the book).

Those two issues aside, the story was great. The ending was a bit anti-climactic and rushed for my taste, but I still really enjoyed the book. The character development was solid, and that's an important part of any story.

Plot/Storyline: 4 Stars

While the plot was not overly original, Mr. Reed did use one new aspect. Instead of having his main character be psychic from childhood, delving into all the little moments in the past where the kid shows talent, but no one believes, his main character, Cass, receives her psychic powers in the beginning of the novel by getting hit on the head. This gave the novel an even flow without a lot of flashbacks trying to explain aspects of Cass' new `talent.' Instead, the reader was allowed to learn about it along with Cass.

As Mr. Reed is known for penning Gay/Lesbian novels, it was no surprise that Cass was a lesbian. However, any reader can enjoy this novel without worry that Cass' sexual orientation will be offputting. There were no graphic sex scenes, for one thing. For another, Cass could just as easily have been straight as far as the storyline was concerned. This, for me, gave the novel a more realistic feel.

The storyline flowed smoothly with a good pace, until the last quarter. At that point, there seemed to be a lot of `filler' designed to make the novel longer, since it was fairly short, drag out the suspense, or both. I'm thinking it was a little of both reasons. I don't mind a little added suspense, but, at times, the buildup was rather cheap. There is a scene (not right at the end) where someone has to tell Cass something, and, instead of coming out and saying it, the person says something else, implying that Cass' son was dead. I would think that if you had a desperate mother looking for her son, you would immediately tell her that what you had to say had nothing to do with her child.

The `psychic' portion of the story was handled wonderfully. I didn't feel that there was any "cheating." I also enjoyed the ending.

Character Development: 4 3/4 Stars

Cass was a sympathetic character, easily understood by any woman, especially a mother. From the opening "Prologue", I am hoping that there might be a sequel featuring Cass solving other murders, kidnappings, etc.

The reporter was also a terrific character. I wouldn't be upset to see them together in a sequel.

The police were pretty realistic in the beginning, reacting as I would have expected when confronted with a woman claiming to have visions. However, I did feel that the female officer's character could have grown a little more once she was shown proof.

Writing Style: 5 Stars

The sentence structure was excellent. There was just enough complexity for good literature, but not so much as to ruin the flow of a good thriller. The dialogue was realistic, with the exception mentioned above. The descriptions were terrific, concise and vivid.

Editing/Formatting: 4 3/4 Stars

There were a couple of instances of missing words. There was also one incorrect pronoun, calling a 'she', `he'. Otherwise, the editing was very good.

The formatting was of professional quality.

Rating: PG-14 for Violence and Child Molestation

This is the first book of Reed's that I have read and it was a terrific, Characters are really fun to read

I am totally amazed by this author...High Risk was awesome and now Deadly Vision-I am left almost speechless! Kept me wanting more and more, could not put the book down!