I have loved and own every book written by Tim Weaver! I have to get them from England since not all of them are offered in the US. All of his other books feature David Raker who finds lost people. This is Tim Weaver's first stand alone book without David Raker being the main character (although he does have a very short cameo). Rebekah Murphy is alone on an abandoned island with a killer on her trail. Detective Frank Travis is looking for Louise Mason who vanished three months ago. Getting the answers makes for another great book from Tim Weaver! ( )

Rebekah Murphy finds herself stranded on a seasonal holiday island off the New York coast after a failed attempt to murder her. Not only is she alone on the island with no communications to the mainland, but she does not know who wants her dead, or why. She does know that when the island reopens in the spring, her killers will be back.

The story of how Rebekah survives on the island for five long winter months is interwoven with her life before and the events leading up to her visiting such a remote place. The sections dealing with her island isolation are terrific. We get a sense of her terror, her resolve to survive, her growing strength as she learns to adapt to her situation and her paranoia as she dwells on who could have wanted her dead and why. She, and we, struggle to understand why no one has come looking for her. Has her estranged husband conspired with her best friend to eliminate her and start a new life together?

The first three quarters of this book are excellent. We get excitement, action, plenty of suspects and twisty turns plotting. By mainly seeing things through Rebekah’s eyes we are hooked into her conspiracy weaving and flights of fancy. The view glimpses into other events and characters are vague enough to leave us wondering, like Rebekah, where this is all leading.

The last quarter of the book, as the island opens up again, is a disappointment. The driver behind all that happens to Rebekah is a rather mundane cover up of another, admittedly horrific, set of crimes completely unrelated to anything that Rebekah was considering. The perpetrator actions seem over elaborate and the key change of heart by the ‘mastermind’ seems false. ( )