Robin Winter

Nicole is not your typical teenage girl. She is more interested in science than boys, and she has some very unique parents. They are both professors. She mom sounds like a hippie and her dad is working for NASA…strange bedfellows. Meg, their neighbor helped out with the homeless population. Brian, the postman knows them all.

The mystery surrounding the people of Isla Vista, California, kept me reading. I couldn’t help but wonder what the heck is going on. I felt the characters seemed almost real.

It’s funny…I was watching a Halloween NCIS episode on TV, when I read this Halloween story. If you’re a fan of B movies, you are going to want to read Watch The Shadows by Robin Winter. You may be looking out of the corner of your eye, or over your shoulder, wincing at the whispering sound of IT.

The great writing made even the homeless lovable and real, the peripheral characters becoming just as important as the main ones. It didn’t knock my socks off, but I do think it’s worth the read…And, who knows, you may like it more than I.… (más)

Nicole, a high school sophomore, could be described as a child protege. She prefers the term science nerd. Her father works on the Nasa Panel, traveling a lot, and her mother runs her own lab at the university, so Nicole’s proclivity for science and biology are no surprise.

It soon comes to Nicole’s attention that the crows are leaving her small town of Isla Vista. When people’s pets mysteriously vanish, body parts are discovered, the homeless start disappearing from their sleeping spots in the park, and a strange gooey substance starts cropping up, Nicole uses her smarts to try to solve this deadly dilemma.

This is a truly creepy story. It starts like an average day in small town America and morphs into the truly bizarre very quickly.

The characters, even the minor ones, will become as familiar as your next door neighbors. Living in a small town myself, I could relate to the claustrophobic feeling of everybody knowing everybody’s business. Adding in the homeless people made it more intense. The odd behavior of some and the dangerous outbursts of others built the suspense.

As to what’s causing all of this; you know that saying “can’t fight your way out of a wet paper bag?” It doesn’t matter if you are the best of the best. When you run into one of these things, you’d better be an Olympic sprinter or your dead.

I’ve always enjoyed horror like this. Something deadly comes to town. You don’t know where it came from, or why it chose your town. The tension and terror builds, slamming forward to that grand face off when you find out who wins or loses, who lives or dies. Once it’s all over your pounding heart finally slows to a normal rhythm and you mull over the story. I did anyway. Wondering what if this happened instead of that? What if so and so lived instead of died? And so on.

I’m also curious how the author came up with the horrific things that attacked the good people of Isla Vista. Well done on giving me something new to be afraid of. I’ll never look at an innocent object the same way again.… (más)