This was not what I expected it to be! I thought it was going to be a cozy mystery but to my surprise and enjoyment it was thrilling and a bit intense. I have a long commute and need to stay awake and alert so this ended up being the first book for that! The way she describes the scenes were really spectacular to me, although the dialog seemed "dumbed-down" to a point it still carried the story along at a good pace. It takes you on a thrilling roller coaster with thrills and chills, romance, sadness, and everything in between. At the same time it depicts some nasty scenes around truly horrifying child abuse and domestic violence, which will deter some readers. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book! ( )

I'm on the fence with this one. It starts out really slow but eventually picks up and somehow the threads manage to find their proper endings. I didn't enjoy the way it was written; the descriptives, random bits of unnecessary explanations and excessive use of punctuation other than a simple '.' took away from what was otherwise a well developed and delivered story. As a first novel it's not terrible and the author shows promise for future books. ( )

The title of this book, Garage Sale Stalker, sounded to me as if it were probably a cozy mystery. Far from it! Though our heroine is a 60 year old grandma, this is the story of a brutal serial killer and how he became that way.

Jennifer loves her family and a good garage sale. She’s smart and observant. When a string of local burglaries coincides with the addresses of recent garage and estate sales, she puts two and two together to help the local police find the culprits. In the course of following these crimes, however, she keeps crossing paths with another garage sale shopper who is definitely not the type she normally sees at these sales. Her growing concern about and fear of him are not misplaced.

This story was not what I was expecting at all but that can be a good thing. It kept me interested from the first page. I like the use of older heroines as I move closer to that age category. The characters were believable and acted believably. Considering recent headlines, the story was something you could almost expect to hear on the news any day.

There were just two drawbacks for me. The use of exclamation points was distracting because there were so many of them. This is unusual for writers in this genre. The other drawback was that at times I felt like I was reading two different books. When reading about Jennifer’s family life, it did almost feel like a cozy but the switch to the segments about the killer felt like you were almost in a horror movie. A bit jarring at times.

The book has descriptions of brutal violence and child abuse. It’s best to know that going in.

I received this through Netgalley and I appreciated the opportunity to read and review this book. ( )