Page Turners: Book Reviews and Obsessions

A Special Kind of Evil by father-daughter true crime authors Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester is the chilling account of the Colonial Parkway Murders. These murders took place during a 3 year span in the late 80s, and then stopped just as suddenly as they had started. Four couples were senselessly murdered in the dark of the night, their vehicles left abandoned in various locations from the Colonial Parkway to a rest area on the interstate with little clues as to what happened. All but one of the couples bodies were eventually found, yet the elusive killer still left little to no evidence for law enforcement to work with, and to this day has yet to be identified. I'm a local who grew up hearing about the Colonial Parkway murders, so I was really excited to order this book and find out more about what happened. I've heard pretty much all of the theories about who the killer might be and have watched countless documentaries on the murders, but there was still much I didn't...

So, as predicted I tore through the next two books in this series once they arrived. Finishing a series is always a mixture of excitement and sadness because of course I want to find out what happens, but then the series is over and I have to look for more works that live up to the finished series. Ah, the perils of a bookworm... Book two in the Sons of Odin series, A Flame Put Out, continues to follow Selia as she adjusts to life in Norway with her berserker husband, and of course she begins to have misgivings about her decision to stay with him. Her love spell is officially broken when Alrik goes into a total rage and seriously hurts their son, but Selia's hope of escape is complicated by the fact that while in his rage, Alrik also put a slave collar on her and essentially made her his thrall. She does manage to escape eventually, though, along with her children and Ingrid and Eydis. I thought the plot was pretty interesting in that Selia finally realizes what everyone else h...