Review: Gripping suspense. A good read!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 5, 2010
I rate this about 4.5 stars, rounded up to five for Amazon's rating system.Zack's had a tough life. Raised by his father, he was often neglected when his Dad went on drinking binges. Sometimes, he'd go for days without food until his father's alcohol haze would wear off and he'd come home with a take-out fast-food breakfast. Now, he's fallen on hard times as the construction company he works for has little work for him.Mal was a golden child. Good looks, good grades... he had a life of promise ahead of him. But when he got to college, he lost his ambition and lived just for partying. He finally got his act together and is working hard at getting everything in place.Until this one fateful night.Zack and Mal don't know each other, but they wake up with little recollection of how they got in the position they're in. You see, they wake up and find themselves chained to each other and both chained to a wall in a basement. While it's bad enough Zack is chained there, Mal's chains are even thicker and his shackles have teeth in them to purposely dig into the flesh and cause pain. There's dried blood on the dirt floor, and it sure looks like their captors have done this before. All Mal remembers is being bitten by a big dog, and his grizzled, gnawed arm is proof of that. Except that the wound appears to be healing rather quickly. Their captors assure them that their ordeal will be over in a couple days, but only one of them is leaving. Oh, and there's one more thing. The captors claim that neither of them will be harming either Zack or Mal, the insinuation is that one of them will be killing the other. As time quickly passes, Mal starts to act differently, and there seems to be little time left for Zack.This is first and foremost a suspense thriller. The love story brewing is a crucial part of the plot, but the focus is on suspense and chills. Sex is on the mild side, as anything deeper would be inappropriate in this setting. These two men, after all, are chained up in a basement and long, complicated acts would be out of place. The mood is wonderfully set, the characters of Zack and Mal are nicely developed and each has his own nuances. Even the secondary characters of the captors are interesting. It's not a long story, rather short actually, but it flies along at a nice pace. As their situation becomes clear to both Zack and you, you're left with wondering just how these two will survive the ordeal, or even if both will survive at all. It really was a nicely-written story.There is a minor flaw though. The story starts off a little shaky. We're looking deep into Zack's past, and then suddenly he's waking up in the cellar. I had to go back and reread the beginning a few more times, and it still felt confusing because there seemed to be no segue between the past and present. I believe the author wanted the reader to be as surprised as Zack was, but the transition from the past to the present was unclear and confusing, and it disrupted the flow of the story for me. Thankfully, that happens very early in the story, and I was able to quickly settle back in and remained transfixed by it through its duration.Suspense and good old-fashioned chills abound in this story. It's a refreshing take on a classic genre, and well worth your attention.