Emma Carpenter has isolated herself with her dog Laika while house-sitting on Strand Beach. She immerses herself in ebooks to pass the time and distract herself from her life, and when she reads a particularly bad one called Murder Mountian by H. G. Kane, she leaves a one star review on Amazon. The author doesn't take this well, and soon Emma finds herself fighting for her life over a rating on the internet.

This book was really up and down for me throughout most of my time reading it. In the first 30% of the story, I was considering DNFing because the descriptions of H. G. Kane (and the way he described himself) were just so absurd that I couldn't help but laugh at him. Most of the sections involving him felt like satire. And while I know there are some men out there who truly see themselves this way, I never want to hear the term "sigma male" ever again lol.

Once the action picked up and Emma was aware that the author was after her, I started to kind of forget some of the goofiness from the beginning and the story started to hook me. It really felt like the action-packed thriller I was looking for. I started to connect with Emma's character more and I was really feeling for her when she talked about missing her husband, Shawn. The twists in the middle chunk of the story were unexpected, and there were some really tense moments that had me rushing to turn the page (well, tap the screen) and find out what happened next.

At 80%, things really started getting ridiculous again. We find out that

Emma and Shawn's 4 month old daughter Shelby actually died in their car accident, NOT Shawn. This is one of my biggest issues with this book - the infant death was only used for shock factor, and I absolutely hated it. The initial reveal was shocking, but then the story immediately moved on to something else and, as the reader, I didn't really get to feel the weight of what had happened to Emma's daughter. I'm personally a mother of a 9 month old, and if my child died in a car accident while my partner and I walked away unscathed, I would not be able to function without thinking about my child. Every waking moment would be consumed by those thoughts, yet Emma only ever seemed to think about Shawn in this story. I understand this is meant to mislead the reader into thinking that Shawn is the one that's dead, but it felt very strange once we realize that Shelby is the one that died and Emma is never read to be thinking about her.

Ultimately, I had more issues with this book than not. I can appreciate the author's ability to write a tense scene, but I'm not sure that I'd go out of my way to recommend this to anyone.

What I liked:
1. Short chapters
2. There's a lot of action
3. The story is mostly fast-paced
4. There were multiple plot twists I didn't see coming

What I didn't like:
1. It was hard to take H. G. Kane seriously because he's so ridiculous, which made the first 30% of the book hard to get into
2. Some parts were hard to follow
3. The author moved on from some of the big reveals too quickly
4. The twists in the last 20% of the book were excessive and felt unnecessary
5.

Infant death felt like it was for shock value only