Welcome to Wonderland. By day, it’s a magical place boasting a certain retro charm. Excited children, hands sticky with cotton candy, run frenetically from the Giant Octopus ride to the Spinning Sombrero, while the tinkling carnival music of the giant Wonder Wheel—the oldest Ferris wheel in the Pacific Northwest—fills the air. But before daybreak, an eerie feeling descends. Maybe it’s the Clown Museum, home to creepy wax replicas of movie stars and a massive collection of antique porcelain dolls. Or maybe it’s the terrifyingly real House of Horrors. Or…maybe it’s the dead, decaying body left in the midway for all the Wonder Workers to see.
Vanessa Castro’s first day as deputy police chief of Seaside, Washington, is off to a bang. The unidentifiable homeless man rotting inside the tiny town’s main tourist attraction is strange enough, but now a teenage employee—whose defiant picture at the top of the Wonder Wheel went viral that same morning—is missing. As the clues in those seemingly disparate crimes lead her down a mysterious shared path of missing persons that goes back decades, she suspects the seedy rumours surrounding the amusement park’s dark history might just be true. She moved to Seaside to escape her own scandalous past, but has she brought her family to the centre of an insidious killer’s twisted game?
Wonderland eBook : Hillier, Jennifer: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
The sky was just beginning to change from night to day as Blake Dozier snuck into Wonderland (ONE)
(Pocket Star, Kindle Book, 5 October 2015, 434 pages, bought from AmazonKindle)
Wonderland is my second novel from the author after The Butcher. I enjoyed Wonderland much more. I liked the setting, a small town whose main source of income is the amusement park which gets preferential treatment from the small-town cops. This preferential treatment comes back to bite them when a series of murders and disappearances can be linked to the park. All the PR in the world won’t save them now. This is a fast-paced, enjoyable thriller. I’d recommend it.
4/5
