Absolute Fear

EVERY SERIAL KILLER . . .
A serial killer is stalking the streets of New Orleans. The victims are killed in a ritual fashion, a series of numbers tattooed into their bodies. There are no clues, no connections except one: a crumbling old asylum that was once the scene of unspeakable madness—and is now the calling card of a new kind of fear.

IS SEARCHING FOR . . .
Eve Renner knows Our Lady of Virtues Hospital well. As the daughter of one of its doctors, she spent her childhood exploring its secret chambers, hidden rooms, and forbidden passageways. Now, somewhere in the decaying asylum lies the key to a betrayal from the past whose echoes are being felt with a vengeance—a crime beyond imagining that seems to lead to Eve herself.

THE PERFECT VICTIM . . .
As each new body is found and forgotten, memories surface, and Eve must race to put together a deadly puzzle, one terrifying piece at a time. A killer is watching, planning, luring her back to the ruins of Our Lady and the shocking truths hidden there. For the sins of the past must be revealed, and the price paid—in blood . . .

• Absolute Fear by Lisa Jackson
• Series: Rick Bentz/Reuben Montoya Book #4
• Published by: Zebra on January 24, 2023 (originally published in 2007)
• Genre: Thriller, suspense
• Pages: 532
• Dates/Time Read: 8.1.25 – 8.15.25 (15 days); 10 hours 31 minutes
• Format: Mass Market Paperback
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• Purchase on Amazon
• ⭐⭐⭐
• 🌶🌶

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Well, all righty then! lol I snagged this book from a coworker. She knows that I’ve put my dating life on hold and am going through my “reading era,” so she tossed this book at me. She picked it up a year ago while stuck in an airport on a layover, not knowing anything about it. She said, “It was pretty good, but I don’t remember much about it.” Well, if that isn’t a 5-star review, I don’t know what is! haha I did have a prompt for the Once Upon a Book Club yearly book challenge to read a mass-market paperback. Since most of my books are paperback or hardcover…I didn’t need much convincing to read it.

I knew zero about this book going into it, other than what was written on the blurb on the back. I was a little perturbed to find that it’s book four in a series. I don’t like that! I quickly Googled about it, and AI told me that while it is in a series, it can be read as a stand-alone. I do agree, because…obviously, I did. But like a lot of series that say that, I think I would have enjoyed it more had I read the prior books. But then again, after finishing it and reading some other people’s reviews, maybe not. Apparently, this book is a rinse and repeat of a lot of the plots and twists from the previous books, just with a few different characters. The book series is called “Rick Bentz/Reuben Montoya” but I’m not even sure if you can call it that. To me, they kind of seemed like minor characters until the middle to end part of the book. They’re literally just the detectives working the case, but the main characters aren’t them. Hell, the MCs in the book pieced the puzzle pieces together way more than the detectives did, in my opinion.

I have to keep in mind that this book was initially written in 2007, and I think that people’s exposure to thrillers has increased, and there are a LOT of really good ones out there now that maybe weren’t out back in 2007. Guys! That was almost 20 freaking years ago!!! Can you believe that?! So yeah, maybe my expectations on a thriller are a bit higher than they would have been 20 years ago. I don’t know. Maybe that had an effect on what I thought of the book, but ultimately, I just thought the book was ok. I gave it a 3-star, but a low, low, almost 2 1/2 star if I’m being honest.

“Father, forgive me,” she silently prayed as the fog and darkness pulled at her consciousness, “for I have sinned.”

I liked the FMC and MMC, and I enjoyed the intensity and turmoil they had over their relationship throughout the book. And there are a couple of spicy, not quite closed-door, but also not in your face, descriptive scenes thrown in there. The book really just dragged on and on. I never had that heart-pounding, “I HAVE to read the next chapter,” feeling in this book. EVER! And that to me is a must-have in a thriller. It doesn’t have to be every chapter, but at least once in a thriller book, I have to have at least one OMG moment, and I never did. When the “OMG” moment happened in this book, it was in the last 50-75 pages, and it was waaaaaaay too far-fetched for me. And frankly, the twists of all the family relations coming out just made it a jumbled, confusing mess to me.

**Spoiler alert** So you mean to tell me that Eve’s mother, who was in a Catholic mental institution, was either raped or had sex with a priest, and got pregnant with twins. They told the mother that the child (because she didn’t know she was pregnant with twins) had died, and even made a gravesite for it. Instead, they were adopted out to separate families. While Eve was luckily adopted into a prominent family full of love, her poor brother, Adam (yes…Adam and Eve), was adopted by a crazy religious nutjob, who molested him and taught him that girls are dirty whores, including his sister Eve. So he grows up resenting Eve for having a better life than he does. He goes off to the military, and then later applies to the police department and is hired. I think in the lab department or something like that. But he applies to the police department for the sole purpose of carrying out his revenge plot on Eve. A man who had once been a psych patient at the mental hospital where Eve spent a lot of her time growing up, because her father was the head psychiatrist there, became obsessed with Eve. Adam waits for this man to get out of prison to finally pull off his revenge and use his mental instability to get him to kill people and eventually lure Eve to him (Adam). Uh…yeah, I don’t buy that! No freaking way would someone go to all that trouble and wait patiently like that. Would they? Then, to top it all off, it turns out that that priest was a pretty awful human being, because not only are Eve and Adam related (obviously because they’re twins), but so is Bentz, as well as his adopted daughter, and Montoya’s fiancé and her sister.

It was just way too much, and way too confusing. I don’t even really think that the familial relations were pertinent to the story at all. Adam and Eve, of course were, but the others were not so much. It just made it that much more unbelievable and confusing to me. The murder and thriller portion of the book was decent. I got Seven vibes from it, if you remember that movie from the 1990s. One of my favorite movies of all time. But the way that the killer left each victim with a tattoo of what seems to be a random number on their foreheads was interesting. Thanks to the book, I also learned what a palindrome is, such as: Eve Renner, Dennis sinned, evil live. Can you figure out what it is?

So overall, it was just meh. I initially thought I would go back and read the books in the series, but I don’t think that I will. I’ve got way too many books on my TBR as it is, and this doesn’t seem to be a series that really goes anywhere or changes. Several people wrote reviews saying that the other books are similar in that there is a religious nutjob killing people, and it somehow always revolves around or relates back to this mental hospital. Eh, no thanks! I’m good!