Review: `I am darkness'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2014
Author Peggy Holloway came to writing late. She has a long and interesting career of teaching mathematics in both the high and college level, working as a geophysicist in a major oil company exploring for oil and gas and working as a counselor/psychotherapist with adults, groups, families, couples and teens. Credential? - a BS in geology, an MCS in mathematics and an MA in Psychology. Her first forays as an author were technical - reports as a geophysicist, research papers in psychology, and letters to authorities while counseling adolescents. She has now written 12 novels ranging from romance to paranormal to mysteries and psychological thrillers and TERROR ON THE BEACH falls into the latter category.Holloway opens her book with a prologue as grisly as anyone has written. A night stalker wanders Monroe Beach at night slashing people to death with a knife and from the prologue we read the following: `I walk in darkness. I am darkness. My name is Twoon. The press has named my Twoon, The Beach Front Stabber. Twoon is proud of his new title.' Once the book opens in sunlight the story begins. Sarah James lives in a beach condo and owns a boutique close by. Her boyfriend, Robert Kola, is the sheriff of Monroe Beach. He is worried about Sarah and wants her to move in with him so he can protect her. She refuses. Things are happening to her that she can't explain. She begins losing time. She will be somewhere and all of a sudden she's somewhere else. She receives merchandise for her shop that she doesn't remember ordering. Someone who smokes has put mileage on her car. When Sarah finds bloody clothes in the back of her closet, she thinks some fiend is trying to frame her for murder ... or possibly, she realizes in terror, she herself committed the murders and doesn't remember. She wakes up, and she's running down the beach with her new neighbor chasing her. A deputy comes over a sand dune and screams for her to get down. Then she notices she is holding a bloody knife.The manner in which Holloway weaves these disparate lines of thinking wed her background in psychology with an uncanny sense of forward momentum.  Once the reader gets through the gruesome opening, the sense of terror is so great that the story demands staying with it until the bizarre plot is resolved. This is psychological thriller writing at its best. Grady Harp, March 14