Really really enjoyed this novel by Steve frech. I haven’t come across his work before but am immediately going to search out the next one. Storyline kept me gripped throughout

4.25⭐️
Jacob Reese owns a coffee shop, a wonderful dog named Murphy and a secret. I absolutely loved this story and the characters…my favorite being Murphy! I was rooting for them all the way. Sandy is also a side-character who everyone needs in their life. I will absolutely be checking out Steve French’s other books in the future. (I just hope his other books have dog characters.). Thank you so much to the author and publisher for allowing me access to this book in advance. I just found a new favorite author!

So good, you won’t be able to put it down. Don’t plan on a full night’s sleep if you start this book in the evening!

Jacob Reese runs/owns a coffee shop and rents out his cottage in the Hollows. He lives a quiet life and makes enough money that he doesn't have to worry about paying the bills.

The only problem Jacob has ... he keeps seeing his ex-girlfriend everywhere he goes. But it surely can't be Laura .... Laura is dead. So who is the woman who looks eerily like Laura and like bad penny keeps turning up.

Things of Laura's keeps showing up ... a music box left outside his house .... a gift of a twig doll he gave her years before is hanging in the trees.. a mysterious note left in the guest book. And who sabotaged his coffee shop with roaches?

He knows it's not really Laura .... Laura is dead. Jacob saw her die. But someone knows his secret ... and they are out for revenge.

It's a well-written and developed plot amid intriguing characters. There are twists and turns that will leave one's head spinning. Small villages have unique residents ... but not all of them are without secrets.

Many thanks to the author / HarperCollins Publishers / HQ Digital / Netgalley for the digital copy of this psychological thriller. Read and reviewed voluntarily, opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

This was a solid creepy read! I was hooked instantly on this story. The setting was awesome and you really rooted for the main character - even though he was clearly flawed he was super likable throughout. There was a huge creep factor throughout and the suspense carried through until the end.

Many thanks to the awesome folk at HQ Stories for the chance to be involved in the blogtour for ‘Dark Hollows’ by Steve Frech which I enjoyed and read overnight-it is a very quick read in that it doesn’t involve a great deal of focussing on plot points, you just go along with the ride and enjoy it for what it is, a really good use of your time.

As for breathtaking twist…regular readers of this blog will know by now the massive groans with which I greet a book which promises something that I will never see coming well a) it wasn;t really a plot twist and b)it didn’t take my breath away(sorry but the setup was quite obvious from the start, it didn’t detract from the story but those of you who love plot twists might find yourself disappointed).

What you have is a man eeking out an living in the middle of nowhere, running an Air BnB by another name ( the great title of ‘Be Our Guest’ was, in this humble reader’s opinion, so overused within the space of a few chapters, that it produced a knee jerk groan that nullified it’s effect).

He runs a coffee shop, The Groundhouse, and supplies local hotels with his own brand of coffee, doesn;t have a girlfriend, and has recently turned a cottage he was using as storage into a home away from home.

The town he lives in, The Hollows, is famous for both its Halloween traditions and its mental asylum-both of these storylines I was genuinely interested in but felt they were underplayed which was disappointing. One was used for what I think was supposed to be the setting of a major scene but fell flat, and the other was underused as a plot device.

Jacob is haunted by the ghost of a girl who he dated in college, and disappeared , was never found and now for that reason he cannot form a meaningful relationship with anyone other than his dog,Murphy. So when despite really tight security and background checks on bookings for his cottage, a rather familiar woman turns up, leaves a meaningful message in the guest book and then vanishes, Jacob flies into a panic as to who has discovered his secret and how long it will be before it is revealed.

Any thriller reader will guess where this is going as the story flips back and forth between Jacob of then and the Jacob of now. That’s not the problem so much as the way that the female characters are written. I felt personally that they were too thinly created and didn’t inspire much of a reaction from me-I struggled to see why existed as more than props to Jacob’s self induced exile. It was as though so much thought went into creating the protagonist, that the rest of the characters in the book, were, excuse the wordplay but they were hollow.

Jacob’s angst was centered on him being found out for something he did back in college, his entire persona was about being hidden so why was he so easy to be found and so publically traceable? His remorse and regret seemed tied up in his feelings, even the ending left this reader with the sense that there was a lack of consequence to what he had done.

There are some lovely scenes in the book, for example there is one when Jacob has a nasty surprise awaiting him in the woods which is chillingly gothic, and also when a pastor is giving a sermon about the link between classic monsters and the seven deadly sins which stuck out for me. And Jacob and Murphy were such a lovely pair, but when you are more concerned about the dog making it to the end of the novel than the humans, that spells trouble. People in Jacob’s life were introduced and then just disregarded,as soon as they had their scenes, they left which really minimised their emotional impact on the story.

I did enjoy it in that I read to the very last page, and it kept me engaged to find out how it ended, but I cannot say it was amazing.Having a male protagonist being stalked and tormented made a neat change from always being the woman who was at threat!It was a quick and pleasing time filler, an aperitif for something deeper, a between books book if you will. I would definitely read other books by this author and would recommend this as good read, just sadly, not a great one.

"Jacob Reese enjoys the quiet life, running a coffee shop and renting out his cottage in The Hollows, Vermont.

But the calm is shattered when a woman who looks eerily similar to his ex-girlfriend Laura turns up to stay in the cottage, and leaves a mysterious note in the guest book."

But how can this be...Laura is dead.

Dark Hollows by Steven Frech was a quick and enjoyable read. The problem I had with the story is it was not very unique and the twist fell flat for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of the book for an honest review.

You can find this review and all of my others over at www.readbookrepeat.wordpress.com

Jacob Reese has an idyllic life, he lives with his rescue dog Murphy who is his everything, rents out a little one bedroom cabin in his small slice of heaven to upscale holiday makers and owns and runs a successful coffee shop in his hometown of The Hollows. Things are good, that is, until he accepts a booking to his cabin for a guest who has left no previous reviews for any other rentals on the website he leases through. Things are okay when she arrives, though she has a startling resemblance to someone in Jacob's past who he would rather forget. When she leaves, however, things become strange. Her resemblance to an old girlfriend freaks him out, but it's the jewelry box left behind engraved with his ex-girlfriend's initials, along with the fact that he is now seeing her everywhere he goes. This wouldn't be so bad except, Laura is dead, and Jacob is the only one who knows. Someone knows Jacob's secret, and he needs to find out who, before it's too late.

When I first started this book, I honestly thought I wasn't going to like it. I found the author's voice to be a bit stilted and kept getting jolted out of the narrative from the lack of flow. However, before I knew it, I was 50% through the book, and I'd only started it that morning, AND I was also working all day.

There doesn't appear to be a whole lot happening in the story, but it moves at a really quick pace and really keeps you guessing. I first found Jacob to come across quite bland, but by about half way through I honestly thought to myself "I like this character". He was just a normal guy, who had made some bad decisions when he was young and dumb and didn't know any better. Yes there was one decision he made that was the King of bad decisions, but I honestly still didn't hate him.

The narrative is told through the present day (obviously) but there is almost like movie-esque changes in "scene" where Jacob is doing something which sparks a memory of what happened years ago between him and Laura or a part of his past which is relevant to what is happening in the present day. I found it odd at first, but I ended up really liking the way that Frech transitioned between these time periods without doing it via alternating chapters, super clever.

As said above, I really liked the character of Jacob, I love a flawed character, and he is full of them, he does his best to be the best person he can be in the here and now, I feel like he'll forever be trying to atone for the shitty choices he made when he was in college. But you can see he really grew from the person we learn that he was, and he's trying to keep his head down and make a nice little life for himself. I think it really goes to show that you can't judge someone from their past. We all make mistakes, some we wish we could take back and wish we could forget, but we all learn from our mistakes, it's how we grow and evolve. Even after learning the truth behind what happened to Laura, I still couldn't hate Jacob, I just felt sorry for the guy and it endeared him to me even more.

We meet other characters, obviously Murphy is the most prominent, I love that we even get told the story behind how Jacob rescued Murphy, it's so heartwarming and it really added another dimension to Jacob's character I feel. The most prominent character besides these two is Sandy, Jacob's manager at his coffee shop, I found her to be bubbly and fun, and I would have loved to see more from her, but she was only a secondary character, so I get it. We obviously meet a lot of other characters, and they were all well written as supporting characters, the one's we are meant to focus on are Jacob and Laura, and I feel that Frech's writing has really done that.

The mystery really kept me guessing, and we don't have to wait the whole book to find out what happened to Laura, but we do have to wait the whole book (just about) to find out what the go is with everything that's going on. I worked it out just as Jacob did, so that's a massive plus, you're finding everything out as the character does. I always enjoy this.

I found the story to be incredibly well thought out and executed. The whole thing, from Jacob's college days up until the end. I will admit, I was kinda hoping we'd get to see a little bit further into the future than where the book stopped, but I just really wanted to know what happened after, and sometimes this is better left to the imagination of the reader.

The setting of The Hollows was fantastic and I wish I could visit! It sounded amazing, I just wanted to rent Jacob's little one bedroom cottage and see what the town has to offer. It was all so well written and described without being over the top. There also was no info dumping, things are fed at a trickle which I found kept me enticed and made me want to keep reading.

All in all, this was a real page turner, and I love that I thought I was going to hate it in the beginning, it turned out being a five star read for me. If you love a good psychological thriller with flawed yet lovable characters, get onto it. You won't be disappointed.

This was a surprisingly good thriller. For me it was a quick read and not super predictable. The plot line was interesting and I really enjoyed the main character! This one gets 4 out of 5 stars from me easy!! This is definitely a hidden gem!!

I found this one to be a quick and entertaining read which I really like. I liked how it focused n the main story without bypassing or subplots. This one really drew me in.

It took time for me to finished the book.

I find the beginning a little bit slow but then I give it a few days.

Jacob has a secret and despite doing his best to hide, it resurfaced especially when seeing his ex-girlfriend alive.

Or he thought to be Laura.

I didn't expect the twist of the story. It was a good one to read.

Thank you to HQ Digital and Netgalley for the ARC!

This book is indeed a mystery thriller. Jacob Reese, the protagonist, is written in such a way that I came to care about the character. However, Jacob is keeping a dark secret. I would not have done what Jacob did. Now, Jacob has to deal with his secret. Does he do the right thing? I liked this book very much. Jacob is actively social in his community and he is a likable fellow with a happy little dog who loves him. I really want the best for Jacob. The violence in this book is not explicit. There are no steamy sex scenes here either, which is just the way I like it. The author, Steve French, did a wonderful job with character development. The setting is easy to follow and I had no trouble seeing the story as it went along. This is definitely one of those, "I gotta see what happens next" books. I would really like to read the follow-up book to this story.

I thankfully received an ARC of this book through NetGalley. I would like to thank the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for a copy of this book.

Dark Hollows. The premise of this book instantly grabbed me. A spooky setting, an intriguing backstory, a loveable mutt and shrouded in the cloak of Halloween. The vista was hypnotic. I envisioned myself walking the paths, talking to the characters and being entranced by the quaint little town of The Hollows. Life is finally going the way Jacob Reese wants it to. He’s a respected businessman, a well-liked individual and most importantly he’s put his past to bed. It’s not coming back to haunt him…until of course, he takes that booking from an attractive female. A booking that he decides to forgo his usual booking protocols for.

Jacob Reese inherited money from his parent’s death. They didn’t quite see eye to eye when they were alive but none the less, they left everything to their only child. He put that money to good use and bought his home and a cottage to rent out in The Hollows, Vermont in New England. He topped it off by buying a coffee shop on the main street – life was good. There was an undercurrent of dread palpating through-out Dark Hollows that had my fingers itching ready for the madness that was surely just around the corner.

Things are about to get even better for Jacob, with talks of a company interested in turning his gem of a coffee shop into a franchise he could be looking at a cool couple of million in the bank. He can’t believe his luck! With a hardworking team and a booming business all his dreams could come true – that can happen, right? Can the appearance of a face from his past (or is it?) undo everything he has worked so hard to achieve or is his mind just working overdrive? Red Hair. Those Eyes. That Scar. He’s imagining it, he’s almost sure of it, and yet…

Things kick into overdrive when he wakes up the next morning and finds his house guest gone. The front door is left open, the entire house takes on a creepy edge and he can’t bat away the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong. The dog feels it. He feels it. Has he let something sinister into his house and more importantly, how on earth do they know certain details about his past? Halloween is edging towards them, its meant to be fun but it just adds to the threatening dread that builds in intensity.

At some points I had a hard time connecting with the Jacob we met at the start of the story to the Jacob that we become accustomed to from the middle of the book onwards. We met a kind and generous man with an infinity towards giving back to the community. Whereas we got to meet a man that became consumed by his desire to get to the root of his troubles (not necessarily a bad thing but…) he became, obsessive, taking courses of action that were not only unhinged but could have landed him in even more trouble. Sometimes the character didn’t fully add up.

Dark Hollows is a great read that will give you the creepy feels. It was an immersive examination of how your past is never really in the past. Actions have consequences.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of Dark Hollows by Steve Frech.

Jacob lives in a small postcard of a town. He has the coziest job of running a coffee shop with a very exclusive and high end Bed and Breakfast attached to it. Hopefully to start a franchise, Jacob ups his game and takes a gamble. But the appearance of a mysterious young woman completely throws him for a loop and off of his game, she looks so much like a girlfriend that he lost years ago. Who is this girl, and how does she seem to know so much about his past?

This started out really strong, I adored the backdrop and the characters, oh how I wanted to be there! I loved the creepy and mysterious aspect of it too. Unfortunately, the further in it got, the less I was interested. It went a bit too far into left field and convoluted for my taste.

Review featured at www.books-n-kisses.com

3.5 Hearts So I am a bit on the fence about this. This book was not what I thought it would be and so maybe my preconceived notions caused me to think differently about the way I am reviewing it.

The story was good. The suspense was interesting but I really wanted it to be something more. Where was the eeriness that the cover made it seem like it would have. I hoped for a ghost story or some kind of mystery since Laura is dead and yet it seems she has just come to the cottage.

I will give the author another try and I do not say this often but may even go back and re-read this later to see if I have a different feel now that I know what the story is really about.

Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was not what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be a spooky ghost story but it was a pyschological thriller. I have to say that I was disappointed that it was not the spooky story I was hoping for.
I received an ARC for my honest review.

This is a gripping and twisty read. We aren’t sure if the events are actually happening as described or if our narrator is unreliable. Jacob has a past that he tried to leave behind but life has other plans.

Review for 'Dark Hollows' by Steve Frech

Read and reviewed via NetGalley

Well what a refreshing read this was!!! I have been in a bit of a reading slum and this is EXACTLY what I needed to pull myself out of it!!!

This was the first book that I have read from this author. In fact, I had never previously heard of the author but the book cover and description instantly drew me in and I was not to be disappointed.

I was sucked straight into the storyline and didn't come out until the very last page and even then it took me a while!!! The descriptions in this book really did make me feel like I was right there with Jacob and Murphy in the Hollows. Ah yes and Murphy!!! I absolutely loved the fact that instead of being just a pet with a mention he becomes part of the main characters with such an adorable personality!!! I found Jacobs personality so strong and charismatic along with the other characters in the story as they were so descriptive and realistic.

The storyline itself was creepy and mysterious, a real psychological thriller filled with nail biting suspense. It is also a realistic storyline in that you could well believe it is happening there and then.

I think the way the author writes this in first person narrative while bringing the past into the present so smoothly goes to show how talented he is. I absolutely loved how, on several occasions, one sentence would begin in the past or present and then end in the opposite. Very well done!!! The book left no loose endings which meant that every mystery was revealed as this is a crime killer for me when an author mentions a clue but later it seems to have slipped their mind.

I would highly recommend this to fans of crime, horror, psychological thrillers, creepy stories, Halloween and anyone who is looking for a fantastic read. I am looking forward to reading more from this talented author.


Rated 5/5 on Goodreads and Amazon

£1.99 to purchase on Kindle

#DarkHollows #NetGalley

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I enjoyed the atmosphere of this book, but I thought it seemed a little predictable. I did enjoy the characters and the dog that was added into the story.

No one can truly escape their past and this epic dark thriller truly represents that. Tension filled and in moments heartwarming - this is a thriller read of the month for me