THE NIGHTMARE THIEF

Spoiled rich kid Autumn Reiniger wants something special for her twenty-first birthday.  Her millionaire father obliges by arranging the ultimate urban reality game for Autumn and her friends. 

Edge Adventures take care of all the game preparations, including tracking Autumn and her friends to get a handle on their personalities, and alerting the police that the game is in progress so they won’t intervene.  But someone else has also been tracking Autumn, and decides that the start of the game, with the police instructed to ignore a commotion, would be the perfect time to kidnap the birthday girl.

Meanwhile forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett and her boyfriend Gabe, investigating a murder nearby, get a serious dose of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when they encounter the six young people being marched along at gunpoint.  It soon becomes clear that whoever is behind the kidnapping has a far more sinister motive than wanting money.

This is a very tense thriller, and although initially one finds oneself getting confused by the number of storylines there seem to be – the murder case that brought Jo out to the wilderness in the first place; the conflicting motives of the gang members; the kidnap victims’ attempts to escape; the colleagues who are trying to find Jo – they do eventually all tie up.

There are twists aplenty in this book, and though it takes a while for the story lines to converge, I did find myself interested in all of them, and wanted to keep reading.    This is a book to curl up by the fireplace with on a wild wet night, when you want to immerse yourself in the story and be glad you’re warm and comfy on your sofa instead of enduring the protagonists’ trials out in the wilderness.