Samuel Parker: Purgatory Road

By Kelly Bridgewater

When a day trip out of Las Vegas with his wife takes a turn for the worse, Jack is sure that he has the ability to get them home. But he drove into something far beyond reason.

Rescue comes in the form of a desert hermit, but hope fades as the couple comes to realize that the nomad has no intention of letting them leave. A chance encounter with a kidnapped runaway and her crazed abductor leads them all farther into the wilderness--and closer to the cold brutality that isolation brings.

At the edge of his sanity, Jack begins to learn that playing by another's rules may be the only way to survive.

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My Thoughts:

I love a good suspense or mystery that takes me away for a couple of hours. When I first read the synopsis for debut author Samuel Parker's book Purgatory Road, I really couldn't wait to read the book. When reading a mystery, I liked the suspense to be high with me wanting to flip the pages because I can't wait to see what happens next. I want to yearn for the victims to come out unharmed on the other end. But, unfortunately, with Parker's book, I didn't feel this way.

While his writing is okay, I did have a hard time with the suspense element of the novel. It was the most disturbing part of the story. First, when Jack and his wife wander in the desert, they get stranded and have to wait until almost death to be rescued. Then the story just stalled for a long time. They were stuck at this elder man's trailer with nowhere to go. Why they didn't leave when they got better is beyond me? Yes, I know they were in the middle of the desert, but they didn't even attempt to leave at all. On the other hand, the suspense element with Colten felt a little odd. It seemed more for shock value than anything else. I believe, and I could be wrong, that Parker wanted to Colten to seem horrible, so he made him taunt Molly, not allowing me to see what was really going on. It just read like a slow-moving, yet moments of horror stuck in gross out the reader. I really didn't like it.

The story moved at a slow pace, and only sped up when Parker was coming to the end of the novel. As for the characters of Jack and Laura, they were one-dimensional with really no personality at all. Their marriage even seemed fake to me. Why would Laura put up with a man like Jake? He only became a hero at the climactic moment. Not before. There really was no romance between Jake and Laura. They really showed no affection to each other or had secret meetings on how they were going to escape, except that one time, and it failed.

With the unpredictable ending and original storyline, I really didn't enjoy this book. Because of the violent nature of some of the scenes, I would not recommend giving Purgatory Road to younger readers. As a fan of suspense novels, I would not recommend this book to others. Pass on this one and spend your time with something more gripping. These are my opinions and other have a right to completely disagree with me.

I received a complimentary copy of Purgatory Road from Revell Publishing and the opinions stated are all my own.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

What makes you give a book a bad review? Would you sample something else by that author? Why or Why not?