April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn.
They’re on a long dark road, late at night, and they see a woman up ahead, clearly in trouble.
They stop and pick her up. It’s only once she’s in the car that they see the blood.
And then they see the headlights, and at last, the woman speaks, her voice faint. 
“I’m sorry. He’s coming.”

“Murder Road” has a wonderful start. April and Eddie, a young couple, on their honeymoon, are lost on a deserted country road at night. They stop to pick up a girl who is shuffling along the side of the road. Only when she’s in the car do they see the blood and understand that’s she’s badly, perhaps fatally injured. Then the strangeness starts.

From the moment they picked up the girl, menace wrapped around April and Eddie like a malign fog and I knew I was reading a thriller with a wif of woo-woo as disturbing as the smell of decomp in a neighbour’s basement. There was a threatening truck, seen only as accelerating headlights in the rearview. The young couple arrive at the hospital soaked in blood that is not their own and are treated not as rescuers but as suspects. There is something off about the quietly menacing way they are treated by the local police, as if they are being stalked, slowly and confidently. The police board them with a local woman who, it turns out, local legend says killed her policeman husband.

The creep factor continued to rise throughout the first half of the book. Some of that was because of the legend of the Lost Girl who is said to haunt the country road April and Eddie were on. Most of it was because I started to understand that no one, not even April, the new young bride from whose point of view the story was told, was who I’d expected them to be.

April has a dark past, a sharp edge to her tongue and a deep-seated distrust of the police. Eddie, recently discharged from the Army, doesn’t trust his memory, his sight or his control over his own actions. The main detective has all the empathy and warmth you’d expect of a psychopath. His presence is oppressive and, in some ways, more threatening that the legendary Lost Girl.

By the halfway mark, I was sure that April and Eddie were going to be crushed in the investigation. Then something happened that lessened the pressure, the plot slowed and suddenly, instead of the grounded but undefined threat to April and Eddie from the police investigation, the couple were mired in a ghost story.

I struggled a little with April and Eddie’s continued involvement but my investment in them kept me moving forward.

Then April, unreliable, secretive, potentially dangerous April, took centre stage, everything became more personal and the tension rose to an even higher pitch than before.

The struggle between April and the detective and the escalating threat from something supernatural that only April and I-think-I’m-hallucinating Eddie could see became so intense that I could only read it for short periods before it became to stressful to be fun.

The stress emanated not from the mystery of the murdered girl or the supernatural incidents but from April and the detective who circled each other like two starved rats in a bucket. For me, the stress was amplified because April was easy to empathise with but impossible to trust and the lead detective was so unpleasant that I found myself hoping he wouldn’t make it to the end of the book.

By this time I was three-quarters through the book and I still had no idea where it was going except that everything was going to get worse.

The resolution, when it came, was satisfying an made sense in a woo-woo logic kind of way. It seemed to me that too much time was spent wrapping things up neatly at the end. It felt like the cool down at the end of a har cardio session – I could see why it was there but it wasn’t much fun.

Overall, ‘Murder Road‘ was an intense read that successfully combined a complex female character with a twisty plot, small-town menace, dark personal histories and dramatic and disturbing supernatural elements.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Murder Road‘. Brittany Pressley’s narration greatly added to the tension as I listened to the story and helped to bring April to life.