Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Serial Killer Thriller

A PAWN’S GAME by Julie Lomax – Psychological Thriller, Serial Killer Thriller, Suspense

In A Pawn’s Game by Julie Lomax, David Morgan wants a fresh start. He moves his family to Chicago, hoping to break his wife Liv away from her habitual affairs. But the Windy City doesn’t offer easy salvation.

Emily, his teenage daughter, is angry in their new home, and David soon notices Liv’s eye wandering towards their neighbor Eric. Not only is his family life falling apart, but he soon discovers his coworkers have stolen his idea and presented it as their own.

David finds peace only during his early morning runs. When David decides to play chess with Lehman, an elderly man he meets in the park, he never imagines that the game will draw him onto the board of a devious serial killer. Each lost piece tears away at more of his life, and casts David as nothing more than a pawn himself.

As he starts to run out of moves in this game of real-life consequences, David must learn to rely on himself and become the king of his own destiny before he loses everything.

David’s “punching-bag” mentality leads to an avalanche of problems, beginning with his wife’s infidelity that now focuses on their new neighbor Eric.

He abandons a long-term job and forces Emily to leave behind her friends and her position on the cross-country running team. David can clearly see that Liv is a problem and that she will never change, but rather than separating from his disrespectful, unfaithful wife, he chooses to make both himself and Emily miserable. When Eric makes a pass at Emily, David has the perfect opportunity and reason to confront him, yet he doesn’t, choosing instead to brood angrily.

It is only after playing chess against Lehman that David begins to understand the need to leave his perpetual defensive position.

Rather than allowing Lehman’s game to completely destroy his life, he begins to devise a strategy of his own. Lehman is clearly the better player, but David refuses to go down without a fight. He begins to control of his own board, taking daring gambits despite the risk.

Julie Lomax’s A Pawn’s Game is a bold psychological thriller where one wrong move can end the game for good. It fuses the elegance of chess with raw human emotion. From a seemingly supernatural chess game to a manhunt for a serial killer, readers will enjoy this cat-and-mouse competition.

October 8, 2025
THE BONES At POINT NO POINT: A Thomas Austin Crime Thriller Book 1 by D.D. Black – Mystery, Serial Killer Thriller, Pacific Northwest Fiction

The Bones at Point no Point, by D.D. Black, begins with a crime so distinctive that it could only have been committed by one person.

A festive Christmas bag, decorated with cheerful season’s trinkets, brings much darker tidings within. Bones. Small gleaming bones, tiny like those of a baby, including a skull. And they’re engraved with the words of a loving poem.

But that one possible suspect is safely locked up in prison 3,000 miles away. A copycat murder seems likely, but one with details only the convict herself could know.

Thomas Austin is a retired New York City cop who now lives in Washington State’s Puget Sound, running a combination general store, café, and bait shop. But even with the great distance, he’s haunted by one particular case.

The Holiday Baby Butcher, serial murderer Lorraine D’Antonia, remains in his mind. It wasn’t enough that Austin had to face the horror of her crimes. He also had to deal with the media circus that surrounded them.

He believes he can put the case behind him until a local police officer calls him about the new case, a duplicate down to the smallest details, that has just been committed locally.

At first, he tries to stay as far away from the crime as possible. But a nosy reporter bringing unwanted publicity to the case and Austin personally, and reports of a second infant abducted from a local hospital, force him to join the investigation.

As the local community shuts down for the Christmas season, Austin and a crew of local police officers begin a frantic search to find the second infant in time, and struggle to understand how this new killer committed such a perfect recreation of the old Butcher murders.

Throughout the story, Austin shows himself to be an engaging, complex character.

Austin’s reluctance and pained memories of New York– including his own wife’s murder– contrast his smart, intuitive skills as a cop. He quickly parses out new situations, whether he is conducting a suspect’s interview or figuring out how a specific crime was committed, with only the barest clues.

The Bones at Point No Point is the first in a series of Thomas Austin books, making a strong first impression for the series.

February 9, 2024
HAVE YOU SEEN ME by Alexandrea Weis – YA Mystery, Serial Killer Thriller, Amateur Sleuths

In Alexandrea Weis’s YA mystery thriller, Have You Seen Me? something is wrong at Louisiana’s Waverly School. Deadly wrong.

This private educational institute for the state’s wealthiest has an unsettling record of young women disappearing. Three, from decades ago, were never found. In the last few years, a girl by the name of Margaret vanished, and now her sister Lindsey has followed suit. Despite numerous investigations, no clues have surfaced. Moreover, the steely head of the school, Sara Probst, uses intimidation and fear to keep the school operating at any cost.

Were these disappearances just high-spirited women who left on their own accord, or was there something more sinister at play? And now, after Lindsey’s disappearance, it seems a serial killer has returned after all these years.

Into this morass steps Aubrey LeRoux, a recent Waverly graduate, hired by Sara to teach history.

The job offer is both temporary and precarious. Sara makes it clear that Aubrey must conduct herself in the precise manner that Sara dictates, using the same unsettling intimidating methods Aubrey experienced as a student.

Aubrey feels the impact of the school’s issues. As a scholarship attendee and a young Black woman, she understands fully the dynamic at Waverly. Harassment was part of her life there, often instigated by Margaret. When Margaret went missing, Aubrey was even briefly interrogated as a possible suspect.

With Lindsey having recently disappeared, Aubrey finds herself experiencing many of the same feelings she had as a student. But now, she’s in a position to deal with it all: Sara, the disappearing women, and now, her students.

What she doesn’t know is that Lindsey had gathered a crew of six misfits, creating a circle of friends who are devastated by her disappearance. They discover Aubrey’s problems with Margaret when they were both students, and so develop a devious plan.

These students will pretend to like Aubrey as a teacher, but meanwhile use every trick at their disposal to prove that Aubrey is connected to the fate of both missing sisters.

They conspire to push Aubrey into helping them become investigators into Lindsey’s disappearance, hoping to force Aubrey into making a misstep, dropping clues as to her knowledge of the disappearances.

Their investigation takes them to parts of the school grounds rarely frequented: founded on a Confederate-era plantation which was itself built upon burial grounds for a Native American tribe. Their unauthorized excursions draw Sara Probst’s wrath on Aubrey but also strengthen Aubrey’s resolve to discover the fate of the missing students.

When it appears their investigation is in full swing, a serial killer begins targeting Lindsey’s student crew, one by one.

Despite Aubrey’s desperate efforts to keep them safe, even with the help of a hunky local sheriff, it’s clear that no one can be fully protected, not when each of them thinks they can solve the mystery of Lindsay’s vanishing on their own. Each of the students is found murdered, with clues that make it clear that this is the work of a serial killer. But who would want them dead? And why?

Have You Seen Me? is a taut, well-written novel, a page-turner with enough plot twists and turns to keep the story moving on multiple fronts. Aubrey’s ethnicity is woven seamlessly into her character and the history that defines her relationship with Waverly. Overall, an immensely enjoyable read.

Have You Seen Me by Alexandrea Weis won Grand Prize in the 2022 CIBA Clue Awards for Suspense and Thriller Mysteries.

December 8, 2023
THE EXCURSION by T.O. Paine – Horror, Thriller, Suspense Action

The Excursion by T.O. Paine is a horror thriller with enough twists and turns to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Two people tell this story. Charly, a woman in her 30s, faces her emotionally damaged family. Randall, meanwhile, works as an agent of Zaroff Excursions, a hunting club for the uber-wealthy with an interest in an extreme form of hunting where the prey is much more intelligent than a deer or bear.

On a cold Thanksgiving weekend, Charly and a few other members of her family travel to an isolated cabin in the mountains above Denver. Her car gets stuck in a snowdrift, leaving her stranded, but that’s only the start of her trouble. She finds that the cabin has been rented by Randall’s company for that same weekend, forcing her family to share the lodge with strangers.

Charly is there for a complicated family reunion.

Along with her autistic brother Jacob, whom Charly has taken care of all her life, she deals with two cousins: Amanda, who must win everything in her life at any cost, and Cal, who Charly fears might be a psychopath.

Randall has come for his “excursion,” well paid for his work, and confident that this weekend will prove his superiority to his boss. A self-styled alpha male, a hunter-cum-master-of-the-universe, he is in control of every detail of what happens in this ultimate form of hunting. Joining Randall in the cabin are Barry, the wealthy hunter who has signed on for this excursion, and Barry’s gaggle-headed girlfriend Kennedy.

But Randall brought one more person. Tyler sits caged in the boathouse near the cabin, kidnapped to serve as the designated prey. Randall didn’t expect his perfectly planned hunt would include Charly and her family, or Barry’s girlfriend, but he sees an opportunity in them. He has delicious, final plans for everyone at the cabin.

What can go wrong for the hunter who has everything perfectly under control?

A hidden pleasure here is the literary “Easter eggs” the writer has planted. For example, Charly’s last name is Highsmith, certainly a reference to celebrated mystery writer Patricia Highsmith. And Randall may well be related to Steven King’s protagonist in his best-selling The Stand. Does the unusual spelling of “Charly” have its roots in the science-fiction novel, Flowers for Algernon?

The Excursion grips you from the first page. Its march through dense snowdrifts and mountains will leave you yearning for waterproof boots, or, better, a blanket to hide under as you dig further into this twisty, unrelenting story. If you’re a fan of satisfying horror novels, this is one not to miss.

November 18, 2022