The North Face of the Heart

Author: Dolores Redondo

Publisher: Amazon Crossing Publishing

Release Date: June 1, 2021

An intense and well-fashioned thriller with lots of twists and turns until the very end.

Amaaia Salazar has been working as a detective in northern Spain using her unique skill set to solve crimes. Now, she finds herself with a group of trainees at the FBI Academy in Virginia. Amaia is assigned to work with FBI agent Aloisius Dupree, who is very familiar with her skills and way of understanding evil using her intuition. They are searching for a serial killer known as “the Composer,” and Dupree is looking to solve another case that has evaded him for years. The Composer sends them on a search from New Jersey to Oklahoma to Texas over years that coincides with natural disasters. The latest natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, sends them to New Orleans where the destruction is worse than ever and the body count climbs higher and higher. As Amaia works to figure out little clues to bring the Composer to justice, ghosts from her childhood reemerge making the case hit closer to home and causing her to question everything she’s ever known.

The North Face of the Heart is a great suspense thriller with a lot of depth to it. The story is not one you can rush through, lots of depth to the characters and mysteries they are trying to solve. All of that made for a great story; for me though, the hardest part to get past was the head hopping. It’s common to have different characters points of views throughout a book but it is supposed to be one point of view at time. Here there were several instances readers would be in one character’s head and what they were feeling and thinking and the very next paragraph would be a different character’s point of view. At first it was very confusing and hard to tell who’s head I was in and then it would switch. For me this is a problem because it took me out of the story, I would be reading along and then have to stop to figure this out, I couldn’t just keep reading, I had to go back and reread to figure out what was happening. If there was a break in paragraphs to show it was changing, that would have helped but that wasn’t the case. Overall, it was a great story if the writing had been cleaner. Now, this book was written and then translated so some of it could have been lost in translation. I would recommend this book to readers that enjoy a good mystery that is detailed and full of twists that will keep them guessing.

I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher.  The views and opinions expressed within are my own.