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Reviewed by Anne B. for Readers Favorite
Agnes was raised in the house her father had lovingly built for her mother. Her mother insisted on keeping the house although she lived there alone now and was no longer capable of taking care of the place. With her mother in bad health she made the decision to move back home and talk her mother into selling the house so that they could move to a smaller one in town. However, things do not always go as planned. Her mother was in a nursing facility and may never come home again. She and the cat Patches would have to stay in the house alone for now. Agnes was frightened of the woods behind the house. The woods held bad memories for it was there that several teens were murdered. Agnes was sure that the killer was still alive. Was her mother hallucinating about the dead bodies in the woods? Or did she know something no one else did? As an added bonus Griffith offers the readers a short short story titled 'In This House'. I found it very enjoyable.
I read this book right before bedtime and decided I was too scared to go to sleep. Author Kathryn Meyer Griffith allows her story to tell itself without hype or the use of gimmicks. The tale slowly builds the atmosphere of fear. There are several characters who are creepy and possible suspects but none more than Herb. Then there is Mitch who’d been having dreams that she was in grave danger. Griffith skillfully draws on the supernatural in this tomb but she does so in a delicate way. If she is this good with a short story I’d love to see what she can do with a full length story.
Reviewed By~Marissa
Review Copy Provided By~Author
Don’t Look Back, Agnes is a very eerie book. That’s not bad eerie but good eerie. The kind of eerie that makes chills run up your spine and your mind scrambling for possibilities. It begins easily enough, with Agnes arriving at her family home to tend to her mother (who had fallen and was unable to get up on her own) and the house; although we quickly find that Agnes has a troubled past. Something in the woods behind the house haunts her. And it is this enigma that keeps the story going.
This book is part mystery, part thriller, part haunting. And I say haunting because Agnes is haunted by her past, by something that happened to her as a teenager that she has never been able to leave behind. There are a lot of twists and turns in this short story that kept me glued to the pages.
A lot of times I would rather see a short story stretched into a longer book; to give more of a background and more detail, but this story was actually good in the short version. I felt as if I knew Agnes well enough and I was kept guessing at the various relationships with the townspeople she came across. The nurse who seemed so familiar and Herb, a friend of her mother’s, who she could swear she knew from somewhere.
There is a hint of romance in her meeting the Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Peterson although it is more perceived than fact, something I found pleasant in this story. This book belongs to Agnes alone and there was no need for a hot-and-heavy romance to boost the story. As I read, I knew the romance would happen eventually (as so often happens in real life) and I was in no rush for them to hop into bed together.
In This House was a second short story included in the book and was the complete opposite of Don’t Look Back, Agnes. Here we have the charming, touching story of an elderly couple at the end of their life together. They have been happily in love for 50 years and they reminisce about the “good old days” as they think back on their life. There is a strange twist here that, yes, I saw it coming, but it had me in tears nonetheless.
Both Don’t Look Back, Agnes and In This House were a wonderful interruption to my usual erotic and romantic fare and I will definitely be picking up more of Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s books.
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