Wind Down by Mark Ewig
Aaron Starks survived a near death experience when he was stabbed by an unknown assailant. All of his college roommates were suspects. However, investigators could turn up nothing to catch the attempted murderer.
Fifteen years later, Aaron is all grown up with a family. Things are going great until he starts experiencing strange blackouts and other paranormal visions. During the blackouts he still interacts with others, but he cannot remember anything he said or did. Doctors are unable to provide an answer. It is not until Aaron has an encounter with Ju’van, a local shaman, that he realizes what he needs to do. He is sent on a journey to meet up with all his old roommates to discover the truth on what really happened the night he was stabbed in the back.
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Review
*I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review *
Rating: 2 Stars
Fifteen years ago university student Aaron Starks was stabbed in the back and left for dead. His attacker was never caught and Aaron had always suspected that one or more of his friends and flatmates may have been involved. Fifteen years on and Aaron is married to his university sweetheart, has three children and his dream job. Then his perfect life is shattered when he starts experiencing blackouts. When doctors are unable to find a reason for these, Aaron learns that his blackouts are connected to the attack on him all those years ago.
I really liked the concept of this novel. The ideas are very clever and original, and this had the potential to be an excellent paranormal/mystery. Unfortunately there were quite a few things that let it down.
The grammar is very poor. It jumps between tenses almost constantly making it very difficult to read, and also punctuation has been used incorrectly throughout. Whilst the characters have potential they are undeveloped and very immature for their age. They act more like primary school children than university students. The writing itself isn’t bad, but it yo-yo’s from either rambling long descriptions to very short sentences.
However, as I said this has great potential. In my opinion it needs to be longer with a lot more time taken to character build (especially the university part of the novel). A revision that adds to this good start combined with addressing the points I made above would make this a really unique and page-turning read.
And I loved the twist at the end! I never saw that coming!
Shari Sakurai 