Orphan Lake

By: Robert J. Walker

Narrated by: Cheryl May

Everyone has a past, and everyone has secrets, no more so than Annie Munroe.

In the quiet town of Pineville, Annie Munroe escapes from a thirty-year captivity, igniting a desperate search for her sadistic abductor. Meanwhile, three teenage friends, after witnessing their friend's abduction, team up with a retired detective haunted by the town's dark secrets. Together, they race against time to unravel a web of hidden horrors and bring the monstrous kidnapper to justice. With every twist and turn, the small town's facade crumbles, revealing a chilling past that refuses to stay buried.

©2024 DBS Publishing LLC (P)2024 DBS Publishing LLC

Retired not dead

Like this story to a point but it still kinda dismissed elder experience. Sometimes just because people retire doesn't mean they forget everything

Gripping ... conceptually anyway. And at first.

Gripping start.
Interesting flashback to show what happened, and I appreciate the author’s use of ‘showing’, vs telling. Unfortunately, it was very slow-paced and didn’t keep on at this rate. It also had poor continuity.

Abduction.
Alternating timelines.
Mystery.


Audio:
Sound quality is good but the narration is poor, as the narrator opted to dictate like a robot, sounding more like AI than an actual human.


Continuity:
-Female lead had been held captive for 30 years in 2014. She “didn’t know” what the internet and cell phones were. We had these things in 1994, even in my low-income home. Yes, obviously far less advanced than they were in 2014 but they did exist.

-There was a suicide victim who they said was [name redacted for spoiler purposes], confirmed with DNA testing. Later they claimed to test her DNA for the first time and deemed it not hers.

^A lot of things like this actually occurred and so I wanted to DNF. I can’t take a book seriously that doesn’t even bother with continuity. Although … at this point there were only a few chapters left.

2 stars - disappointing.