This book was pretty good. This is a psychological thriller. This follows Ophelia and she's had a complete mental breakdown after her divorce with her husband. It's a shirt read. She ends up going a little crazy and having psychotic behavior towards her husband and his mistress.

This book was one of those stories you want to turn away but you just can’t. It had me glued to the edge of my seat and flipping pages like crazy!
I loved getting a look inside our FMC’s mind, it was dark, twisted, but also allowed you to completely sympathize with her and want the best for her. I think the author did a fabulous job of portraying her and giving us a true peak into her mind. Even when she was just doing mundane things I was completely captured by this book and never wanted to stop reading.
I think I could see how this book wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you love thrillers and you are interested in seeing into people’s minds that are a bit crazy than this book will definitely be for you.
I also really enjoyed reading about the side characters and even though I didn’t like what they were doing I still did like them.
I think the lead up and the story line were very well thought out and overall I just really enjoyed this book!
Thank you so much Netgalley for my arc copy, I am leaving this review on my own.

I knew I would love this book as soon as I saw what it was about. This will be one for the folks who love women wronged who take things a bit too far and who can't let it go. This was told from the perspective of a woman whose husband cheated on her with a much younger woman and ended up leaving her for her. Unable to let it go, she stalks and watches the two as they build a life together and goes more and more mad along the way. I definitely recommend!

Ophelia's world is crushed when husband Andy not only has an affair with work colleague Amber, but decides to move in with her and end his marriage. Abandoned by her mother only a few months after her birth, and being raised by an uncaring father, Ophelia's fragile confidence, which had grown during her marriage, is shattered. Unable to move on, she becomes obsessed with her philandering husband and his new lover. She spies on them to such an extent that it's clear her mental health is on a downward trajectory.

Overall, I enjoyed the story...a bit of a departure from my normal reads, but interesting nonetheless. Ophelia's narration, at times feels, detatched, as if it's someone else going through her trauma and she is a mere spectator, reporting events. Despite this, it was an entertaining read which made me keen to follow it through to the end.

I would like to thank Regal House Publishing , Carol La Hines and Netgalley for an ARC of The Vixen Amber Halloway in exchange for an hones reivew.

This book was just okay for me. I guess I found it unpleasant to be inside the head of such a disturbed person, although I suppose that was the point of the book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to love this book - the writing was excellent and I loved the main characters voice and POV (I do love a book about an unhinged woman). However, I think the story would have been more successful if structured differently. From the get go, you know Ophelia has done something that has landed her in prison and once I figured out what it was, there was just not enough suspense or intrigue for me to keep reading. I considered DNFing around 70%, but I pushed through to finish it. It was a very interesting character study, but plot-wise, it just didn’t hit for me.

Thanks NetGalley and Regal House Publishing for the eARC, provided in exchange for an unbiased review.

At first, I was very much not sure about this one. The way that our MC speaks is kind of off-putting. Ophelia is…a lot.

But, oh boy, that ‘lot’ turns into one entertaining hot mess!

The author brings us the ultimate in unreliable narrators and an intense story that ratchets up into absolute insanity. Eventually, you’re just reading this completely riveted while muttering in utter disbelief. The obsession (yours and our narrator’s) is nail-biting.

Expect an entertaining, upside-down but very warped world where you find yourself rooting for the absolute wrong person – and you just don’t care.

• ARC via Publisher

I liked this books. It was interesting watching Ophelia’s life unravel. She is an unreliable narrator. But seeing her justifications is so interesting. Her husband was a shit and slimey but her fixation is so intense it becomes all consuming. It was quick good read.

This was a perfect book for what I needed it for, which was a quick read to get my mind off a heavier book I'd just finished. This book reminds me a lot of YOU by Caroline Kepnes, but it was different enough to be interesting. I really hated our main character in a satisfying, love-to-hate them way, but was impressed with the author's ability to still make her a little sympathetic to the reader.

Apart from that, there wasn't a ton that I loved. The comparisons to Dante fell flat for me, and while I understood its purpose in the story, I really don't like the girl-on-girl hate that was so prevalent here. Overall this book served its purpose for me, but I don't see it being anything remarkably deep-cutting.

A portrait of one woman's descent into madness. Ophelia is a professor of Dante who has been married to Andy for 5 years. Of course, she finds out he's cheating and he leaves her for his colleague, Amber, whom he met on one of his many "business" trips. Ophelia is left bereft and decides to spy on the lovers, staking them out from the foreclosed neighbor's home and digitally. This all culminates in a harrowing scene where not everyone makes it out alive.
In the beginning, I really felt for Ophelia, who has HUGE abandonment issues. But as the insanity creeps on and her break from reality is complete, you just kind of want her to get some help. This is unrequited love taken WAY too far.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Regal House Publishing for this e-arc.*

This was an enjoyable light thriller that focuses mainly on the unraveling of a woman after her beloved husband leaves her for another woman. This felt like it was inspired by Maud Ventura's 'My Husband' in a good way -- more commercial than literary, more plot-driven than psychological. Ophelia isn't quite as obsessed with her husband, but she is still fixated on him to a deeply unhealthy degree. At the same time, you develop a bit of sympathy for her -- after all, she hadn't done anything wrong (until she did).

At times difficult to believe and a little overwrought, The Vixen Amber Halloway will appeal to readers who enjoy humor in their domestic suspense/thrillers. I believe that the narrative gets stuck and spins around in circles for a while as we watch her watching her ex and Amber, with little pushing the action forward until forced by outside forces.

The Vixen Amber Halloway is Carol LaHines’s addition to the ever-growing microgenre of “good for her” literary thrillers. The story itself is told from the perspective of Ophelia, a former Dante scholar imprisoned for a nebulous crime involving her ex-husband and the woman that, in Ophelia’s eyes, caused the downfall of her marriage. Told in a series of short vignettes, the reader follows Ophelia as her marriage crumbles and she spirals further and further into a state of obsession, jealousy, and rage.

Several things were going on here that I enjoyed, as well as a couple of other aspects of the novel that didn’t work as well for me. For one, LaHines did a great job integrating literary allusion into the text. Ophelia’s academic interest in divine and medieval punishment and her specialization in Dante’s work are mirrored quite effectively in her own journey into the subconscious and the unraveling of her sanity. It’s also a pretty fast-paced book and the writing style fosters this in a way that kept me on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what Ophelia would do next. It’s not told in a purely linear, chronological style, and skipping back and forth between Ophelia and Andy’s marriage, Ophelia’s time in prison, and all of the moments in between revealed important information when it would be most effective.

However, I found myself rather let down by the ending, and the novel's tendency to drag in the middle made its mere 200 pages still feel too long. If you’re going to write a “good for her” thriller from the perspective of the jilted and borderline-psychopathic ex-wife, go all in! The ending felt like a bit of a cop-out, not necessarily in line with Ophelia’s perspective on her crime. I can also see that LaHines was trying to integrate aspects of Ophelia’s childhood into the story in order to give her a more complex psychological background, but even by the 20% mark I was tired of Ophelia’s repetitive musings on abandonment and her thoughts on her mother leaving her as a child. There is a lot of soliloquizing throughout, and to have Ophelia be SO aware of the damage that this abandonment did for her psychologically ends up feeling a bit out of line with the otherwise aloof and unreliable tone. There’s also something to be said for subtlety—the links between Ophelia being abandoned by her mother and then cheated on/left by Andy feel less impactful when the narrator herself explicitly makes this comparison at every given chance.

This could have been a great short story or novella if some elements were tightened up a bit. I would still recommend it as a quick and engaging thriller with some interesting academic perspectives, although it's not necessarily adding anything new to the genre.

Thank you to NetGalley and Regal House Publishing for the e-ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

this book started good and I was curious to see where it would go however there were some things that did not live up to the expectations


some parts were repetitive and it got boring. i still wanted to see what would happen so kept on reading.

the ending felt really flat; everything seemed so rushed with the hostage situation and the trail and everything.

i wish we could see more of the characters and their mental state, especially the FMC

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

As much as I wanted to like this book--the premise and the fact that the main character lives in the world of academia made me primed to be interested--I couldn't get into the book, even though it wasn't very long. The repetition from the narrator made things feel redundant, as opposed to feeling intentional for a particular reason (even with the unreliable narrator). The beginning moved too slowly for me to hang in there.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I was completely glued to this story. My heart went out to the MC. I could feel her anguish and heartbreak. The author did a great job of putting you in the shoes of the one being mistreated and embarrassed while hubby is galavanting around with zero remorse. But then there is a shift and things get wild... I can't give spoilers, but I recommend everyone read this. I absolutely couldn't put this book down!

This is an enjoyable enough thriller, but it doesn't really reinvent the wheel. There's not much I can say beyond "it kept my attention", and while there are certainly worse things for a book to be, I don't have strong enough feelings to go out of my way to recommend it. The frequent timeline jumps were jarring, and I'm growing tired of the trend in women's thriller fiction to emphasize the mental illness of the unreliable narrator (it's just getting tired at this point), but I did find the plot engaging and the writing was competent enough to keep me from getting frustrated or distracted. I don't have high praise for this book, but I don't have too many critiques, either. I expect fans of the genre will enjoy it - and, disclosure of bias, I'm not a huge thriller reader, so it does take more for a book to hook me than it might for true fans of this type of book.

I originally DNFd this book a few months ago, but decided to give it another try. My reading experience didn't go any better the second time. I love a good unhinged female story, but this one was unoriginal and the writing was horrible. There was so much repetition of the same information (the main character mentioned her mother's abandonment almost 15 times by chapter 28) and the author must have expected the reader to have a dictionary on hand because there were way too many words I had to look up their meaning. I honestly don't like leaving bad reviews, but I didn't like this one at all.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me an early copy of this book.
Wow what a book I raced through this story devouring every word. Such beautiful writing that really conjured up the feelings of this unreliable narrator. We are aware from the start what we are dealing with in terms of her actions and the consequences but you can't help feeling sorry for her and getting dragged along for the ride.

Here we go again: another book that is being mismarketed. To sell this book as "mystery/thriller" is quite a mistake.
This is a work of literary fiction with a slight touch of mystery.
Personally, I love lit. fiction, but I love mystery/thriller more. Moreover, I'm done being made a fool. This wasn't the first or second or third or fourth or fifth...(and so on) time I picked up a mystery/thriller novel and it turned out to be just a literary fiction, or even another genre desguised as mystery.
I also didn't particularly fancy this author's writing style and, for such a short book, it drags a lot.
Not for me. And that's alright. Other readers might enjoy this.
Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC.

This was a quick and fun read- told mostly from recollections of the main character, Ophelia. She was cheated on by her husband, Andy and it kind of spirals down into her obsessively stalking her husband and the mistress. Some childhood abandonment trauma from her mother comes up throughout the book.

Overall this was a great read and would definitely recommend!