Murder Road by Simone St. James is a supernatural mystery/thriller and I’ll be honest I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. I read it in one day, so that says I wasn’t bored or distracted by it, but I also was left feeling a little “well …” So for me, it’s a solid three-star read. Fun, did its job by entertaining me but all felt a little … ephemeral at the end.
Set in 1995, the story follows newlyweds April and Eddie who in the grand tradition of horror stories take a wrong turn on their way to the cabin they have rented. They end up on a lonely road late at night and come across a young woman walking along the shoulder of the road. She’s not quite hitchhiking, but they slow down and offer her a ride. Once she is in the car they find out that she’s been stabbed by an unknown assailant. That’s bad. Then it gets worse when a truck tries to run them down, and then when they get the poor girl to a hospital, she ends up dying. Naturally, Eddie and April are suspects, and while trying to prove their innocence they unearth a bigger mystery. The young woman they picked up is not the first person to die on that lonely stretch of road, and oh yeah there is a ghostly urban legend that is maybe not so much a legend.
Who the killer or killers are the central mystery of the novel, but it is not the only one. Both April and Eddie come with mysteries about their past that slowly unfold over the course of the novel. There is also the mystery of who the ghost who is haunting the road is, and what her motivations are. The mysteries all get resolved by the end, but my milage very much varied with each reveal. Some of them I saw coming, some of them felt like a bit of a letdown, and some worked-ish for me. I would say that I enjoyed the journey more than the destination when it came to the mysteries in this novel.
The 1995 setting works well for the story, the characters can’t do some research on the history of the area on their phone, but have to do some more old-fashioned sleuthing. At one point there was mention of minor characters being an asset to the FBI, and that made me go “man this would have been a good monster of the week X-Files story”. And I mean that as a compliment. It’s got creepy vibes, investigative work, and local law enforcement that is not a help – yeah I could have seen it as an X-file.
Even having written all this out I’m still not entirely sure how I felt about the novel. It felt very middle of the road (no pun intended because of the killer stretch of road setting) to me. I picked it up because of the promise of a ghost story in it, and it delivered on that. I think it just felt a tiny bit overstuffed at some points, but it was still a nice diversion on a day off work.
