Reviews with content warning for Alcoholism - Hunted

This book truly had me hooked from beginning to end. There isn't a single Darcy Coates book I haven't loved, but this book had a different spin. The changing perspectives are well executed, and provide slowly converging windows into the unfolding mystery of Eileen's disappearance. The plot twists were shocking but still felt natural, where you could now see the foreshadowing once the twist had been revealed, but not able to guess the outcome yourself. It's not the first time I've thought I need a movie of Darcy's books!

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lindzboots's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

An excellent thriller! This book read like a slasher film set deep in the green labyrinth of a national orest put on paper. It was well-written and the audiobook reader, Angela Dawe, put on a truly impeccable performance. Written entirely in third person, we got to experience the perspectives of several different characters, and each one had a wonderfully unique voice. It was thrilling, excruciating, gut-wrenching, and terrifying at times. An excellent tale about determination, love, and humanity’s insistence on survival.

Some highlights for me: the eerie atmosphere of the ominous forest really shone through to the point where I was a little spooked reading it at night; being inside Todd’s head was excruciating in its own right and I ate up every second of it; the combinations of spooky forest, cryptid horror, and serial killer slasher hit all the right buttons; and though I’d suspected the answer to the mystery way, way earlier, the end truly surprised and delighted me.

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grayh777's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I wasn’t sure about this book for the first 10 chapters but after that I could not put the book down. Love it.

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omair's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.75

Hunted delivers in bunches what it promises, but does it do so at the cost of having the depth to be truly memorable?

Hunted is an easy read, with short chapters that change scenes at a frantic pace. Mixed with the extremely generic world - more on this in a moment - everything feels foggy or blurry. If this is by design, as I'm choosing to believe to credit author Darcy Coates, then it meets the mood at every turn of the page. If you don't believe this to be intentional, well, then the cracks in the story will likely prove to be too great.

From the first paragraphs, Hunted really imparts a vision of a horror B-movie, something made to be straight to streaming. The character and story tropes are laid on thick

and you realize there's a twist coming that you're not given enough clues to solve with certainty... well, unless you know the tropes already

One of our main POVs

is a group of post-teenagers that truly had me thinking of a knock-off Scooby-Doo quartet, just Shaggy replaced with a stereotypical jock. It doesn't help that they literally get in a van that clinched the Mystery Machine feel to me.

And with that, the mystery is afoot... except that it's not really a mystery at all. Pay just a bit of attention, and you quickly

begin to expect a masked villain at play.

Coates keeps the shrouded sense of it all pretty well though, and the story is never so dull that you're tempted to put it down and walk away.

But what it does lack is anything to really draw you in, to get lost amidst the details or to feel transported into its world. Nothing feels particularly vibrant or lived in. Frankly, I found myself questioning when and where the story takes place. It may as well be set in an alternate USA where they did adopt the metric system and Zuckerberg's rise stalled well into the 2010's.

In the end, I did not hate reading it, nor did I particularly enjoy it, but - most telling for me - I'm not even sure I'll remember having done so a month from now. As such, it's hard for me to recommend this to others, but maybe it'll be a guilty pleasure read for you. I finished it over the course of two nights, so could be worth for anyone wanting to sneak in a title while waiting for a hold on something else.

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sugarcorpse's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

An incredibly well written book with a gripping and entangling story, full of loveable and complex characters, as well as ethical questions that linger long after finishing. It was hard to put this book down at any point.

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maregred's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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witchy_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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