The Nightmare Man by J. H. Markert

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I listened to the audiobook version of this book and have some mixed feelings. While I enjoyed the narrator’s voice, and the story, I felt like it was a bit slow at times, especially in the beginning when it seemed like the whole book was about an affair. There were lots of characters to keep track of, and most of the story was done in flashback. The only actual “action” was at the end of the book, and although that was my favorite part, I still wasn’t crazy about the ending. Like I said, mixed feelings, but overall I did really enjoy the story and I would recommend to readers who like a creepy mystery.

Thank you to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for an advance review copy of this book.

Here's the blurb:

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.

Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills, along with his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, is determined to find the link to the book—and the killer—before the story reaches its chilling climax.

As the series of “Scarecrow crimes” continues to mirror the book, Ben quickly becomes the prime suspect. He can’t remember much from the night he finished writing the novel, but he knows he wrote it in The Atrium, his grandfather’s forbidden room full of numbered books. Thousands of books. Books without words.

As Ben digs deep into Blackwood’s history he learns he may have triggered a release of something trapped long ago—and it won’t stop with the horrors buried within the pages of his book.