Review: The Dead Game - Susanne Leist - Paranormal Romance Guild

Title: The Dead Game
Author: Susanne Leist
Genre: Paranormal Thriller
Publisher: Outskirts Press, Inc.
Release Date: August 28, 2013
Pages: 320

After graduating college, Linda Bennett leaves New York for the slower-paced lifestyle of Oasis, Florida. She opens a bookstore and makes new friends. Life is simple-that is until the dead body washes up on shore. She is horrified to learn that dead bodies and disappearing tourists are common for this small town. There is talk of secret parties being held by the original residents in their secluded mansions. Once the sun sets, the tourist-friendly town becomes a haven for evil and dark shadows. But this is only the beginning.

Linda and the other young residents receive an unsigned invitation to a party at End House, the deserted house in the forest behind town; a house with its own violent history. They are pursued through revolving rooms and dangerous traps, barely escaping with their lives. Two of their own remain trapped inside. Or so they think.

It's up to Linda and her friends to search out The Dead and find the evil one controlling their once peaceful community. Can they trust the Sheriff and his best friend, Todd?

THE DEAD GAME has begun.

Charlayne Elizabeth Denney

Reviewer for the Paranormal Romance Guild

The little town of Oasis seems to be idyllic, the type of town you go for vacation. Everyone is happy, the businesses are thriving, and the town is beautiful. Then Linda and her new friends, who are all new to the town, get an invitation to a party at the mysterious mansion, End House. The group tries to find out who is hosting it, but the townspeople are not really forthcoming with details. Todd tries to discourage them attending, but ends up going with the group.

The house is haunted, or possessed, with traps, weird things happening, and two of the group disappear. The rest of the group escapes, and they start to try to find out what is really going on in the town. The story takes several leaps from finding out what Todd is to who is good and who is bad in the town.

Dead Game tries hard to be very mysterious. The party that happens at End House is reminiscent of some of the ideas out of the movie Saw. Author Susanne Leist has some good ideas about how her vampires work, from some being “vampires” which are the human blood drinkers and evil and the “human vampires” who drink animal blood and can go out in public. Neither group like the other and then another person in the town, Wolf, has a splinter group of vampires called The Dead who creep around, look in windows, and chase residents.

I got lost in some of the descriptions of the town and the fact that there are a lot of people named and doing things. The description seemed to go on forever, detailing out the town as Linda walked through it, with who was next door to whom, what they did, and such. It would have gone better if it was taken as each person was introduced, as Linda talked to them. The people were hard to keep straight, who is whom, who is what, and even where they belonged in the story.

The end of the book stretched on and on as Linda and her friends found out who was in which group, confronted them, solved another mystery and then something else happened. I kept thinking “ok, this is the big finish” but I was wrong at least three times. The ending finally came and it wasn’t satisfying because there had been so many “gotchas” in the reveals.

Dead Game has a good premise, but the execution and especially the ending lacked a lot.