Run for your Life

Title: PsychoAnalysis
Author: V.R Stone
Release date: October 16th, 2016
Format: e-ARC
Pages: 269
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A serial killer who wants to quit. A detective struggling to keep his personal life out of a murder hunt. And a celebrity psychiatrist facing an incredible challenge. Three damaged individuals, linked by their traumatic histories. They’ve chosen very different paths. Now those paths are about to cross.

Sarah Silver is a hedge fund manager – from Monday to Friday she makes a killing in the markets. At weekends, though, she hunts men, not profits. Martin White used to be a brilliant detective. But his family, judgment and self-control are deserting him. And Karl Gross has sold millions of books on serial killers. However he’s a controversial figure in the medical community.

Can Martin keep it together and catch a killer who commits almost perfect crimes? Is Karl capable of unravelling Sarah’s psyche and putting an end to the killing? Or will she disappear when she realises that the hunter has become the hunted?

PsychoAnalysis is a psychological crime thriller that explores the grey area between good and evil. Why would a woman kill for fun? Can she be understood? Can she be stopped?

Digging into a serial killer’s mind is fascinating. Exciting and fascinating. Those words work perfectly for Sarah Silver. The opportunity to “meet” a female serial killer is the main reason that spurred me to read this book. We too often get the usual male killer, sometimes with original and scary motives, but women are left unfairly excluded from the killing scene. Is it because women are believed to be more emotional and empathetic? I don’t like generalizations. Not all women baby-talk to toddlers whenever they see one, not all women are connected to their feelings. Some women have proved to have as much power and resources as men. I even believe that women can muster a lot more drive and focus on a task once she has set her mind to it.

Sarah is a strong woman. Strong in every sense of the word. A shark in the city, a dangerous stranger in the streets. But this life is getting to her, the need for a chase is growing fast, making her take more risks every day, endangering the life she worked hard to erase and the one she worked hard to create. Diving into her head was not as scary as I thought, She is captivating character to follow and the writing really made me feel I was living every chase with her. Her plans were always perfect and her cold and methodic ways gave me goosebumps. Although very interesting, it was never as frightening or horrifying as I thought it would be. Except for a part involving a dog. I feel the need to mention it in case you don’t want to read about animals being… used, in any way. As a faint-hearted reader, this part was a bit too much. I would have been okay with more blood from men!

Having her seeking help for her urges was a great choice, but I would have liked it to be more useful to the story. The book offers you very “special” therapy sessions but I felt I learned more about Sarah when she was out, rather than when she dived into her past. Enlightening as it was about her current situation, I wanted to hear more about the quitting, but in the end, I never had the feeling Sarah really wanted to let go of this side of her, she just wanted to know what had made her the way she was, and so did I!

Karl Gross is all about exploring the minds of the wicked. Addictions, sex, nothing is more fascinating to him. But there’s more to the guy than the psychiatry specialty. I was leery of the guy from the first time I met him in the book, thinking he would benefit from a therapy himself! As for our police face, I never warmed to Martin, a damaged cop operating on instincts, relying on weed and alcohol to face the day or the night. As many beginnings do, we get snippets of his life to help us understand the character. His preference for cold cases is obvious but unless I was tired and forgot an entire chapter, I think I never really got an explanation for the case mentioned and used to show us that Martin doesn’t give up.

Those three lives become connected in a creepy and disturbing way, giving the reader a story with multiple sides and I really enjoyed the intertwined threads which helped me stay alert and looking for the next twist.

I also really appreciated the fact that every character had issues. No one is spared from the scars of the past and everything is reflected in their adult lives. It probably was the scariest part for me. Your childhood is the foundation of your life, and what’s in the past doesn’t stay there. It never does!

My problem with this book had nothing to do with the characters, who fit the genre and were interesting enough to play their role the best they could. What annoyed me throughout the story was the investigation. Martin White, a cop on the brink of losing his family, relies on instincts. Now, I know that every year as a policeman teaches your mind to work a certain way, to get reflexes civilians wouldn’t have the use of, but there’s a difference between instincts and going blind into something. The entire investigation is based on a hunch that felt so far-fetched so early in the story that I felt all sense of reality fleeing from the pages. I won’t give any details to avoid ruining the fun for future readers, but without tangible connections and real police work, it was difficult for me to believe they could go this far into the investigation based on words from a stranger and ten years old cases in foreign countries better known for their beaches than police inquiries. There was too much luck and too many links made out of nothing to convince me.

Ultimately, the chase was only compelling from Sarah’s side and her efforts to keep the police away gave the story a steady pace and enough tension to keep me going.

PsychoAnalysis offers disturbing characters and a clever way into a killer’s mind but fails to satisfy the crime lover I am with a weak police investigation.

I would like to thank the author for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.