Catherine (alternativelytitledbooks) - so very behind!'s Reviews > Dark Roads

**Many thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Chevy Stevens for an ARC of this book! Now available as of 8.3!**

Atmospheric, authentic, and anxiety-provoking!

It's a dark and eerie highway where the girls are lost forever... and Cold Creek warns its inhabitants to be on guard. Women are taken from the highway, with the criminal targeting First Nation women in particular, and this stretch of road has become synonymous with murder and unsolved cases, as the perpetrators have continued to strike, never being brought to justice. Hailey knows she must exercise caution living in this area, and after tragically losing her father, she struggles to pick up the pieces and find solace at her uncle Vaughn's home. Unfortunately, this new environment not only proves to be far from comforting, but dangerous, as Hailey discovers policeman Vaughn has some pretty ugly secrets and perversions involving the women of Cold Creek...and an ever-present watchful eye on Hailey. When Hailey finds something resembling love with a waitress named Amber, she must work even harder to protect her best friend Jonny and Amber from Vaughn's dangerous proclivities....before this bad cop strikes yet again.

The narrative then jumps forward a year in time, where Amber's sister Beth has left law school (but hasn't told her ultra-conservative parents) and arrives in Cold Creek to attend a memorial---Amber's memorial. What she finds is an opportunity to pull back the layers of mystery still shrouding these cases and her sister's untimely death, and she follows in her footsteps by taking a job at the local diner and getting close to Jonny, learning as much as she can about Amber's past and Hailey, by association. But as she is aware, the killer is out there--unchained, untethered, and looking for his next victim---and Beth fits the profile all too well. Can she and Jonny get to the bottom of this long-standing and terrifying chain of disappearances and murder before Cold Creek's cursed highway claims yet another innocent?

I have been anxiously awaiting another novel from Chevy Stevens for oh, about 2 years now...and it's safe to say she put every ounce of time she could muster into researching and preparing for this novel. Her very poignant author's note details how Cold Creek is fictional, but is based in reality---and this novel hammers that point home. The best way I can describe reading it? This one is basically like an episode of Dateline brought to life...but from the victim's perspective. Chevy's attention to detail is second to none, and this one almost doesn't even feel like fiction, which is essentially what she was going for, so full marks in that respect! However, this hyper-focused attention to detail makes this book feel like a fairly long read, and it probably could've been cut down significantly to keep the pace moving at a bit more of a clip.

While I could almost smell the forest air and hear the crackling of branches under my feet, this novel felt far more like a suspenseful survival story in many regards than a psychological thriller. There are a few twists here and they all serve the narrative well, but I think the strength of this novel is not so much in the plotting itself, but the characters and their fully developed world, particularly the charming and oh-so-lovable dog Wolf, who is destined to win the Canine of the Year award from the National Book Review (if they haven't started handing out this award yet...and let's face it, they should!) Honestly, this connection to character is what took this book up a notch for me and kept me engaged throughout...and the epilogue is SO phenomenal (and spooky!) I bumped up my rating on that alone!

Chevy Stevens has done it yet again, and reminded all of us who she is through her beautiful and thought-provoking suspenseful writing--a dog lover, a proud inhabitant of British Columbia, an advocate for women....and most of all, a writer we have SORELY missed! 💗

4.5 ⭐, rounded up from 4 for the incredible epilogue!