Cremator's Revenge: Margaret LeNois

 

She lay naked on the cold, hard plywood that was beneath her, her long, straight, platinum blond hair framed out in a mass of tangles around her head, adding a mild contrast against the dark brown color of the crate she laid tied up in on the gurney. Her head would not clear the fog that shrouded it and her back ached with a dull throb. The coarse ropes that bound her thin body were causing bright red burns on her darkly tanned skin where they had rubbed the flesh raw. She turned her head slowly from side to side, her large brown eyes surveying the almost bare dark room. The guy, Dennis, was nowhere to be seen. She tried again to think, to focus on where she was, how she had gotten there and exactly what had happened.
Ms. LeNois strikes once again with an action adventure romance thriller that will hold the reader spellbound as page after page is filled with mystery and suspense, action thriller, mystery and romance. Ms. LeNois is paramount among contemporary authors of mystery and suspense, action and adventure.

Alfred Stillman was just a small boy when he was abandoned by his mother and left with his maternal Grandmother who was a kind, loving and trusting woman who always found an extra dollar for a donation, time for a sick friend, and food for the drifters. But then it was drifters who stripped, gutted and hung her like a shot deer. After Stillman is released from the mental hospital, his vengeance becomes an obsession, venting his anger on every person he feels falls into the category of slum trash. Alfred Stillman is a retort operator at a funeral home, so he has access to commit the perfect murder. No bodies. No remains. Joanne Logan is a naïve new reporter given the job by her newspaper to write articles about the street people and how they got there, what they do and how they survive. She decides that the best way to learn about these people is to live in their world where she will learn to survive as if her life depended on it. And it does. She gets caught in the middle of a war between Alfred Stillman and the street people—a battle for survival. Joanne Logan gets the story of a lifetime if she lives to write about it. Margaret LeNois’ Cremator’s Revenge is a unique story of life on the streets of Daytona Beach, Florida, and of the dangers and hardships that the homeless face every day of their lives. It is a story of the twists and turns, which life and fate dole out in people’s lives, changing their destinies forever. Ms. LeNois spent two years of her life working with the street people of Daytona. Her characters are so real that they could almost be any one of the people who live in the streets. Her knowledge of the area makes her story real beyond belief, and her background in psychology and knowledge of mass murderers makes her novel the story of a perfect crime.

I bought this book on a recommendation of a friend and boy, was she ever right! This book kept me reading all night and all day. I could not put it down. It is fast-paced, and you get swept up in the story. The title was perfect choice for the book. Here we have a very disturbed serial killer working as a cremator at the very graveyard where his beloved grandmother lay. Obsessed with her death, a twisted kind of religion, a benevolent hate for destitute people and being a loner, took a toll on him. It seemed, for a while at least, that refuge could be found in tending his beautiful gardens out in the Florida sunshine. 

The author is brutally realistic and shows a true understanding of people in less privileged situations and the life circumstances that brought them there. We are shown how street people, or "streeters", survive the elements, avoid dangers and locate food. The huge benefits that the meals, clothes, showers and comfort that volunteers provide is a gift that cannot be measured for those who have no access to these things. The "streeters" creation of tight and protective substitute families, aid against the prejudice within society. And those that aim for greener pastures face huge challenges.

The heart-thumping pace is kept steady with the author’s skilled use of fear, righteous wrath and revenge - emotions that today’s society can relate to and on some level, even cheer. A tense romance triangle between a feisty reporter, a frustrated cop and a destitute military veteran really spices things up. There were sections of such chilling horror that I shivered, but couldn’t break away from reading just one more page. 

I absolutely loved reading this psychological thriller and highly recommend it to readers who like a book that is hard to set down.