Jennifer HillierThriller · Psychological Thriller
Wonderland
Synopsis
"Welcome to Wonderland. By day, it's a magical place boasting a certain retro charm. Excited children, hands sticky with cotton candy, run frenetically from the Giant Octopus ride to the Spinning Sombrero, while the tinkling carnival music of the giant Wonder Wheel--the oldest Ferris wheel in the Pacific Northwest--fills the air. But before daybreak, an eerie feeling descends.
Maybe it's the Clown Museum, home to creepy wax replicas of movie stars and a massive collection of antique porcelain dolls. Or maybe it's the terrifyingly real House of Horrors. Or...maybe it's the dead, decaying body left in the midway for all the Wonder Workers to see.
Vanessa Castro's first day as deputy police chief of Seaside, Washington, is off to a bang. The unidentifiable homeless man rotting inside the tiny town's main tourist attraction is strange enough, but now a teenage employee--whose defiant picture at the top of the Wonder Wheel went viral that same morning--is missing.
As the clues in those seemingly disparate crimes lead her down a mysterious shared path of missing persons that goes back decades, she suspects the seedy rumors surrounding the amusement park's dark history might just be true.
She moved to Seaside to escape her own scandalous past, but has she brought her family to the center of an insidious killer's twisted game?"--
How it reads
Prose complexity 4/10
- Muito Bom Mais uma vez a autora escreveu um livro impossível de largar, mas ao contrário dos outros aqui eu achei o final muito óbvio, mas tem uma explicação pra isso apesar de só ter sido lançado no Brasil em 2025, ele foi publicado originalmente em 2015, e depois dele a autora publicou outros livros. Mas apesar disso eu fiquei o tempo todo querendo saber como seria o final . Aqui vamos acompanhar a Vanessa uma investigadora que acabou de sair de Seatlle e se mudou para a pequena cidade de Seaside, e não saiu de lá por vontade própria, a autora vai contar tudo pra gente. Ela se muda e assim que toma posse do seu novo cargo, um corpo surge em um parque de diversões, e ela vai descobrir que as coisas nesse parque não seguem muito bem as regras da sociedade comum, e tudo pq se acontecer alguma coisa com esse parque a cidade vai simplesmente deixar de existir. Mas quando ela descobre que além desse corpo 3 pessoas desapareceram dentro do parque, a investigação ganha força e ela já não se importa se no meio do caminho a cidade simplesmente deixar de existir, afinal eram apenas garotos, e sumiram sem deixara vestigios. A investigação flui muito bem, e a gente vai conhecer direitinho como as coisas funcionam lá dentro, e a gente vai acompanhar um dos garotos que desapareceu, a gente sabe onde ele está, e se prestar bem atenção na história a gente também sabe quem é o responsável. Um final tenso, e muito satisfatório
- I am torn on how to rate this. I absolutely hated most of the characters. I have never read a book where there were so many terrible characters! The only good person was Jon Jon, a child! Okay Vanessa, please explain to me why you move to a small town, under super sketchy reasons mind you, and then decide to have a one night stand on your first night there?? Could you not have picked a town on the way? Or I don't know, somebody in the big city you just left?? Major spoilers, beware since these won't be behind a tag on mobile: did they ever explain why she killed her husband??? And why the guy helped her cover it up? Why in the world was that brushed aside?? I also hated that she slapped her daughter. She was out of line and it showed what a terrible person she was. Did no one smell all the dead bodies???! Why didn't the FBI or done other agencies get involved with the sheer number of missing individuals? I've made up my mind, too many questions and things that annoyed me so I'm reading it a 2 because it's ok. I'll check out some of her other books though!