Thin Ice by Paige Shelton ~ a Review

by Donna Huber

The good thing about being suddenly overcome with fresh terror is that you forget everything else you were afraid of. At least temporarily. (chapter 1)

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

December 2019; Minotaur Books; 978-1250295217
audio, ebook, print (288 pages); mystery

Thin Ice is the first book in Paige Shelton's newest series Alaska Wild Mysteries. I've only read one other book my Shelton, the cozy mystery The Loch Ness Papers. I enjoyed Shelton's writing and I'm kind of burned out on cozies so this looked like the perfect read.

Beth Rivers has had the harrowing experience of being abducted. She managed to escape but thanks to a traumatic brain injury, she remembers very little about the abduction or how she escaped. With the sociopath still at large, and her inability to identify him, she runs away to a remote town in Alaska. On the very day she arrives in town, a local resident is found dead and foul play is suspected.

The abduction of Beth Rivers is the ongoing mystery of the series, the latter mystery is solved within the pages of this book. The two mysteries are balanced well throughout the story. As they are both given about equal time, and I had forgotten that this was a start of series and not a stand-alone, I was confused when there was less than 10% left of the story and we were no closer to discovering the identity of Beth's kidnapper.

Thin Ice has enough suspense to add a nice tension to the plot, but it is not the anxiety-causing, nailbiting suspense of a thriller. While I love heart-pounding thrillers, sometimes life is too stressful to be getting stressed out over characters in a book. It had just the right amount of suspense to be a good escape read. If you are looking for a book to curl up under a cozy blanket with and escape real life for a few hours, you definitely should get this book.

The mystery and the people are much more realistic than what you find in a cozy mystery. There are still some interesting characters - those that you wouldn't find anywhere else except in a very remote, very small village in Alaska. I'm still wondering about Donner. Is that his first name? If so, were his parents high on something when they named him after one of Santa's reindeer. Is it his last name and he's related to the Donner Party? Orin is an interesting character, though I feel like we only got a glimpse at him. Actually, character development is a bit think for most of the characters in the book. Outside of Beth, we only get to know 3 or 4 characters rather well and two of them leave the town at the end of the book. Perhaps future books will develop the other characters in the book more fully.

Overall, this was a really good book. The writing is great. It is a pretty quick read if you can spend a couple of hours at a time reading. You want to get to know the characters and pretty early on I cared for Beth and was compelled to keep reading to be sure she was safe.

I recommend Thin Ice if you are looking for some "me time" during the holidays.

Buy Thin Ice at Amazon

Donna Huber is an avid reader and natural encourager. She is the founder of Girl Who Reads and the author of how-to marketing book Secrets to a Successful Blog Tour.

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