Title: Cold Feet
Author: Brenda Novak
Rating Out of 5: 5 (I will read this again and again and again)
My Bookshelves: Contemporary, Romance, Romantic suspense, Thriller
Dates read: 2nd November – 2nd December 2019
Pace: Medium
Format: Novel
Publisher: Harlequin
Year: 2004
5th sentence, 74th page: Where’s my girl?

When the past won’t go away…

The Seattle police suspect Madison Lieberman’s father was the serial killer they call the “Sandpoint Strangler.” Madison refuses to believe it. Her father is now dead, and all she wants is the chance to create a new life for herself and her six-year-old child.

Then she discovers something in the crawl space beneath her parent’s house. Something that makes her question her father’s innocence. Or the innocence of someone else who’s equally close to her…

When another woman turns up dead, crime writer Caleb Trovato wonders whether they’re dealing with a copycat killer. Or is the real Sandpoint Strangler still alive? Caleb’s sure Madison knows more than she’s telling, and he’s determined to find out what. But he doesn’t expect to fall in love – or to lead Madison and her child into danger…

I have never read a Brenda Novak story, nor have I heard of them. This was just the only book I could find with the word “feet” in the title… and I needed that for a reading challenge. It turns out that it was a brilliant choice. I absolutely adored this book. And I was completely blown away by who the villain in this tale was. Actually, the mix of romance and suspense in this novel was not at all expected, and seriously enjoyable.

Normally I tend to guess who or what is going to be the killer fairly early on. Or at least, I get pretty damn close with my guess. I DID NOT see the identity of the bad guy coming at all! I started to have an inkling of the fact that: a) my initial hunch was wrong. And b) who the actual bad person was. I’m not normally this damn surprised, and every time I thought, hmmmm… maybe… there was something that quickly disproved my theory. It was brilliant!

I like that this romance featured a divorcee and her young daughter. That it was all about perceptions, loyalty and trying to find your way in the world. Rather than a twenty-something woman who had never experienced love, was a virgin, ya da, ya da, yay da… she had already had some really difficult experiences. And so had he. The older I get, the more I appreciate older characters in romances… after all, their experiences seem to start being a little more in line with mine.

The only reason I didn’t gobble this book up in just a day was that it was an eBook. There is something about eBooks that tend to take me a little more time to read… yet, the physical copy of this (which I now want to find a second hand version of) would have been completely inhaled in a matter of hours… late at night… when I was supposed to be sleeping.

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Image source: Goodreads