Merry Jones - The Deadly Neighbors

In this third novel featuring art therapist Zoe Hayes, the neighbors are shocked when a woman's body is discovered in the kitchen of Zoe’s estranged father, Walter. In fact, they suspect Walter of killing her. But as Zoe investigates further, it seems that the neighbors are up to some pretty shocking shenanigans themselves.

As Zoe tries to prove her father’s innocence, she encounters a cruel ring of organized criminals who specialize in dark and deadly forms of entertainment. Trying to escape their grasp, Zoe—with her daughter, Molly, in tow—must solve a series of grisly murders, but in the process, stumbles into secrets that force her to reconnect with a lost and very frightening part of her own past….

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Zoe doesn't like to think about her childhood. Her memories surround her father and mother fighting because he'd had a serious gambling addiction which drove her mother to death when she was around six-year-old.
No wonder she hasn't had contact to her eighty-three-year-old father in over. When she receives a call from an anxious neighbor he wouldn't be well and needs someone to check on him she reluctantly agrees to go to his house with the thought to introduce his grandchild Molly at the same time.
Little did she know that when she and Molly finally enter the house through the basements door that she would find her father kneeling above a woman lying on the floor with a knife in his hands and the woman's throat slit.

From there on Zoe is constantly confronted with her childhood which seems to be blurred by images she can't understand. Her father cleared of being a murderer the neighborhood seems to be threatened from something the call the "gang" with little to no information's what this is about except that the dead woman wasn't the first victim. Dogs are killed in most violent ways just to be followed by their owner.

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Zoe doesn't seem to grow up in this novel. Endangering her child and the unborn child, not listening to her body when she's suffering from major contractions she get a bit annoying. She doesn't understand that her fiancée Nick Stiles is afraid for her and his unborn child well being. Her lack of self-confidence in her relationship with Nick gets a bad taste after having too much of it. She's behaving insensitive which took a lot of the reading fun I'd experienced with the first two novels and I'd seriously like to slap her.

Rating:
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Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur; 1st edition (November 27, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312356218
ISBN-13: 978-0312356217