Review: Pacific island chills
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 30, 2014
Sacrifice Island is about two ghost hunters who are conducting research on various haunted locations around the world for their next book. Alex and Jemma, a team for a number of years, decide to travel to the Philippines to examine a nearby island which served as a religious retreat center before some visitors started killing themselves on site and others began disappearing. Expecting an island jam-packed with ghosts, they set out to dig up unusual accounts of hauntings for their upcoming anthology. What they find, however, is far worse than they could have possibly imagined.Author Kristin Dearborn spins an engaging tale in this short novella from DarkFuse. The pacing is quick, the setting is unique, and the “thing” haunting the island is a fresh creation. The outcome is fairly predictable, but the ride is fun just the same. While I enjoyed the narrative overall, I felt the characters were a tad weak. The character of Jemma is unusual – she is haunted by her own childhood abuse and cannot be touched physically, but her quirks do not seem authentic and are easily abandoned in the services of the plot. Alex is even less developed. His background is sketchy, and I had no idea what he looked like (until late in the book) or how old he was. More importantly, the exact nature of their relationship was never really explored or developed. I realize the author intended to place more emphasis on the plot, but some of these human characteristics would have been rounded out the story a bit more. So, an engaging 3 star kind of read.