Scott and Elise have moved into her terminally ill father's
house in the Hamptons. Elise spends her days at the
hospital with her dying father, and Scott, a freelance
photographer, has little to keep him occupied, especially
since it's the dead of winter. He then notices a bedroom
light in the supposedly vacant house next door turning off
each night at the same time. Scott becomes obsessed with
the occurrence and decides to explore the old house.
The
exhilaration he experiences has him inviting Elise to join
in his nightly forays. This seemingly modest indiscretion
quickly turns into something neither of them can control.
Evil started years ago unleashes a terrible chain of
sinister events, totally consuming Scott's world.
THE WINTER GIRL by Matt Marinovich ratchets up the
tension with each new plot revelation. The narrative is
compact and concise in this psychological thriller loaded
with surprising twists and turns. Just when I thought I'd
deduced the outcome, Marinovich cannily threw in another
shocking element that turned everything upside down. THE
WINTER GIRL is sure to give readers plenty of chills.
It's wintertime in the Hamptons, where Scott and his wife,
Elise, have come to be with her terminally ill father,
Victor, to await the inevitable. As weeks turn to months,
their daily routine—Elise at the hospital with her father,
Scott pretending to work and drinking Victor's booze—only
highlights their growing resentment and dissatisfaction with
the usual litany of unhappy marriages: work, love, passion,
each other.
But then Scott notices something simple, even
innocuous. Every night at precisely eleven, the lights in
the neighbor's bedroom turn off. It's clearly a timer . .
.but in the dead of winter with no one else around, there's
something about that light he can't let go of. So one day
while Elise is at the hospital, he breaks in. And he feels a
jolt of excitement he hasn't felt in a long time. Soon, it's
not hard to enlist his wife as a partner in crime and see if
they can't restart the passion.
Their one simple
transgression quickly sends husband and wife down a
deliriously wicked spiral of bad decisions, infidelities,
escalating violence, and absolutely shocking
revelations.
Matt Marinovich makes a strong statement
with this novel.The Winter Girl is the psychological
thriller done to absolute perfection.