Midnight Rain [Paperback]

Holly Lisle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2004

Phoebe Rain's sadistic ex-husband lies in a coma a thousand miles away-a coma she put him the last time he tried to kill her. Yet Phoebe knows the voice on the other end of the line belongs to the twisted man who vowed he'd never let her get away. Panicked, she turns to her neighbor, Dr. Alan MacKerrie. Alan finds the story hard to believe himself, but now he, too, is receiving chilling, ghostly warnings of danger. Caught between icy terror and mounting passion for Alan, Phoebe knows there's no escape.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Holly Lisle has been doing the pro novelist gig since 1992.  Prior to that, she was an on-again, off-again missionaries' kid, high-school entrepreneur, and once past graduation, a newspaper ad rep, a sign-painter/commercial artist, the "window girl" at a McDonald's, a guitar teacher for absolute beginners, a singer at local restaurants, and because all of those together paid starvation wages, she went to nursing school the next year, and two years later was an RN.

For ten years.  

She paid off her student loan the same year she got her first three-book contract, and...well...she's been writing for her supper ever since.

She is active online, providing courses teaching what she has discovered about writing fiction as well as maintaining her own weblog and website, HollyLisle.com. And with more than a million books in print via commercial publishers, she has now moved to publishing herself.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Onyx (November 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451411757
• ISBN-13: 978-0451411754
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,041,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She is currently working on the second book in her Cadence Drake series.

Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer...which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:

"So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we'd tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children's Home, where we lived.

"My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.

"It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, "That's a bear footprint. From the size of it, it's a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear's still around."

"Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.


" 'I don't have the gun with me that will kill a bear,' he told me. 'I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I'm going to shoot him so he'll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.'

"The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I'm sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.

"We were not eaten by a bear that night...but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I'll ever forget.

"I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I'm putting on paper isn't at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn't make my cut."

Cheerfully,
Holly Lisle

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inventive Plot - FABULOUS Read!!!!, October 31, 2004

By 

M. Rondeau (West Springfield, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Midnight Rain (Paperback)

This romantic thriller has just about everything you could ask for in an action packed story filled with suspense, intrigue, a broad brush stroke of the paranormal, and topped off with a great romance that makes it sizzle. Phoebe Rain had survived 8 years married to a sick psychopath. She evaded him for two years until the day he finally tracked her down showing up in her classroom to create total mayhem and killing two of her students before she was able to stop him. Struggling with the injuries she sustained from the gunshot that blew out most of her knee, Phoebe was ever vigilant just knowing that he still lived, even though he was still in the coma she'd put him in for the last two years. When threatening phone calls started, Phoebe didn't want to believe, but knew that the voice belonged to the twisted man who had vowed to never let her go.

Once before, Phoebe had ignored the warnings she'd heard from beyond and disaster had struck. She would not ignore the warnings again and when the apparition of a young girl appeared to her begging her to go and help her neighbor, Phoebe listened. At 3:00AM in the morning, she went and knocked on the door of her neighbor, Dr. Alan MacKerrie, to warn him of the danger. Extremely apprehensive of the warnings from a comparatively stranger, a young woman he'd lived next door to for two years, he found her story hard to believe except that he himself had received warnings from the same young child - and he knew that child to be his very own daughter who had died five years earlier.

Using an inventive plot the author pits these two wonderfully needy protagonists together to battle inexplicable threats from a psychopath killer lying thousands of miles away, in a coma, reportedly at death's door. Phoebe who hadn't dared to dream of a happy ending for herself, and Alan who had ceased to believe in living after the fiery death of his beloved daughter were drawn together by need and a mystical connection through his daughter's warnings. To put it bluntly, this was one heck of an absolutely riveting suspense/paranormal romance - totally AWESOME! Hello, Hollywood this could be a blockbuster! Frankly from Chapter 21 on I was having such an adrenaline rush, I could have jumped out of my skin for all the suspense and terror. BOTTOM LINE - This is superbly, fascinating ride of a suspense filled romantic thriller that culminates with a perfectly wonderful heart wrenching soggy tissue ending! Do yourselves a BIG favor and find this book for a FABULOUS read. --- Marilyn Rondeau, for www.allromancewriters.com ---

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chilling And Riveting Reading!!!, February 6, 2005

By 

Kristi Ahlers (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Midnight Rain (Paperback)

Holly Lisle is an author that after only one read I've added to my "must read" list of romantic suspense authors. "Midnight Rain" is a compelling read that is both chilling and riveting. I was totally absorbed into the fast paced read from the very beginning.

Phoebe Rain's life has never been simple, easy, and safe. She lives in hiding fearing that her abusive husband will finally finish what he started years earlier. Working as a tarot card reader for a phone network and living without friends or family is starting to take it's toll. Just when she thinks that maybe...just maybe she can start opening up she starts getting phone calls from her husband that should be in a coma. She knows that it's him and she knows it's only a matter of time before he makes good his promise to see her dead. If this was not enough on her already full plate she has developed a friendship of sorts with her next door neighbor. She finds herself drawn to Alan and hopes that she manages to live long enough to see what being truly loved and cherished feels like. Problem is she has been told that her husband has died and the person she's being stalked by could in no way be Michael. Does this mean she's being haunted and stalked by a ghost or is her nightmare truly a flesh and blood person?

This book offers the ultimate nightmare situation. This book was chilling and the evil element in this story is truly amazing. Phoebe and Alan are dynamic characters' that come with their own individual problems but at the same time are open and willing to trust. Their relationship is slowly built over the course of this read and therefore believable for the reader. It has been a very long time since I've read a book that made me want to keep the lights on after I put the book down. For spine chilling read I highly recommend "Midnight Rain" as your reading choice.

Official Reviewer for www.romancedesigns.com

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wife Loved It, August 31, 2005

By 

Wisconsin Dad (Wisconsin United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Midnight Rain (Paperback)

This is the first review I've done on a book I didn't read, but I will try to make it helpful despite that fact.

Having stumbled across Holly Lisle's fantasy books, I decided to purchase Midnight Rain for my wife. She is an avid suspense/thriller reader. My wife could not put the book down. She stayed up late on a work night to read the last 100 pages. Now, this is pretty rare around our house. Very few books she reads captures her attention like Midnight Rain did.

Holly, my wife wants more along the same style. Get writing!