This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined.
Utterly genius

4.5 ⭐ ⭐

Tim McAndrews, the deputy district attorney, and top prosecutor, is a well-sought after bachelor. However, he dedicates his life to his career; sentencing criminal after criminal to jail. He's satisfied with his life until he notices a beautiful woman dancing down the last few steps of the James Street parking garage. He makes the effort to see her everyday after that, but it takes him seven months to pluck up the courage to speak to her. When he does, they hit it off, and Tim finds himself falling head over heels for Daniela St. Clair almost immediately. However his honeymoon-mood is soon quelled when his best friends Scott and Kathy - respectively Detective Renton and Dr. Hope - approach him; there are two girls that have shown up dead; both single; both wealthy; both poisoned. Tim immediately notices these girls are the exact double of Dani. It's a race against time to find the serial killer before Dani becomes the next victim.



WOW. Really, wow! I am so impressed with Sarah Vail's debut novel. This book is actually inspired by true events - ones that Vail experienced herself - in an interview she stated:

"Several life experiences inspired writing James Street. When I was a young woman, I was stalked. It was a very frightening ordeal. I can still remember the night that he was finally arrested. I was eight months pregnant and my husband was working. Home alone, I was doing some domestic chores. I don’t remember why I looked up, but when I did, I found my stalker standing on my back deck looking through the sliding glass door at me."

Not only was this experience used for the greater good in shedding light on how quickly harassment can escalate, and how scary it is to be the victim of relentless stalking, but Vail also took classes in Criminology and Forensics, and you can really see the benefits of that in James Street, I can't really say much more without giving things away but every avenue in this book is thoroughly explored, from what I could read; there were no mistakes, just cold, hard, slightly entertaining murders. Ones that I could not pick plot holes in. Which is a bit of a pastime of mine. I have to congratulate the author on integrating her life experiences into a novel that will not only entertain readers, but teach them, too.

I thoroughly enjoyed 95% of this novel, it is so impeccably well written, the choices the author orchestrates in not only her plot twists but her writing style makes for a seriously riveting piece of work. Throughout the novel, the readers are treated to alternate perspectivse; Tim's, and the killers. Now, sometimes I find that the killers perspective is a bit... universal, for lack of a better word, everyone writes the same thing sometimes; I am killer, I kill things, I enjoy killing, I see my next victim, I kill them blah blah blah, but Vail's killer isn't like that. I mean, it does start off like that, but around the half-way mark, my doubts were assuaged as her killer evolves from creepy creepo to actual real-life stuff-of-nightmares could-happen-to-anyone killer.

Not only that, but Vail unvails (see what I did there?) whodunnit just past half-way, giving the novel a chance to give the readers what they want and the story what it deserves; both mystery and thriller, without the overlaps, which can sometimes get a little confusing as an author tries to keep both atmospherical genres up throughout an entire story. All of this is interspersed with fluffy romance, which would seem a little out of place ordinarily, but for this debut, it works. I can't explain why, I don't have that kind of vocabulary or thought process: It. Just. Works. It gave me a break when the tension was a little too teeth-clenching, and it allowed not only the main plot but a few of the sides stories to really connect without going all out into the mysterious-creepy-thrilling dark side.

The side characters in this novel are truly great. They are the kind of characters that I would genuinely read a side novel about. Vail relays their personalities to the readers really well and I was never fed up of them popping in and out of the story.

I think the only thing that I didn't like about this novel is.... dun dun dun, the sex scenes. Okay, sure, there are only two, but they felt generic and tacky. I was not a fan, it was a whole new depth to the characters that I could have gone without knowing, if you know what I mean.

This novel genuinely feels like picking petals off a daisy; do they get a happy ending? Do they not? Do they? Do they not? With each turn of the page, it felt like it could go either way. The finale was pretty epic, I didn't see it coming until I was almost on top of it! I find that with thrillers/mysteries, the ending can sometimes spoil an otherwise exceedingly entertaining read, but this one did not disappoint, thankfully, which means I'm happy to highly recommend this book.