For your pleasure, I have a guest reviewer appearing today.
Dawn Roach, admin at The Art of Words, has kindly agreed to review Love Lies Dying by Steve Gerlach, Australian dark fiction writer.

Author: Steve Gerlach

Genre: Dark Fiction/Thriller

Main Characters: John, Sherrie and Zoe

Main Theme: Instead of being greeted by his wife, John arrives home to find a stranger (Zoe) reclining on the sofa and his wife missing. Believing that she has been kidnapped, John and Zoe set about tracking down the kidnapper.

Plot Development: No surprises held here…the story begins in a logical, orderly fashion and develops rather predictably.

Character Development: Unfortunately, the characters contain no depth nor are they given any chance to develop into believable entities. Instead, we (the readers) are introduced to our main characters, given vague descriptions and then promptly abandoned.

Setting: Both the rural and the city scenes are disappointingly vague and bland.

My Opinion: After all the hype given this author, I had very high expectations but after reading this lengthy novel, I was left feeling rather short-changed and disappointed. This book is in need of a severe edit; at least one third could be removed, leaving the reader with a much more stream-lined story. The occurrence of John’s dream sequences seems, to me, to be irrelevant to the story and the narrative gives you the impression that you are being spoken to in monotone.

On the positive side, this novel is written in easy-to-read “everyday” English, it ends with an interesting twist and it delivers a moral, albeit sick and twisted in nature.