Review--Burden Falls by Kat Ellis

 

Riverdale meets Stephen King in the terrifying new thriller from the author of Harrow Lake.

The town of Burden Falls drips with superstition, from rumors of its cursed waterfall to Dead-Eyed Sadie, the disturbing specter who haunts it. Ava Thorn grew up right beside the falls, and since a horrific accident killed her parents a year ago, she's been plagued by nightmares in which Sadie comes calling—nightmares so chilling, Ava feels as if she’ll never wake up. But when someone close to Ava is brutally murdered and she’s the primary suspect, she begins to wonder if the stories might be more than legends—and if the ghost haunting her dreams might be terrifyingly real. Whatever secrets Burden Falls is hiding, there's a killer on the loose . . . with a vendetta against the Thorns.

 

 

 

 

Kat Ellis’ latest novel, Burden Falls, is a chilling tale of ghosts, murder, and mystery! This was a read that kept me guessing at every turn, jumping at every shadow, and a burning need to turn the pages faster to see what the epic outcome would be! Needless to say this was a book that had me hooked!

It’s been one year since Ava’s parents died and she lived with her aunt and uncle. We open to the day where they are moving out of their ancestral manor after economical issues and moving into a smaller house nearby. But when Ava learns that the Miller family was the ones to purchase her house, she’s a bit enraged. There has been bad blood between her family and the Millers for longer than she knows, but it was the Millers’ care who crashed into her parents and killed them one year ago.

Ava especially doesn’t get along well with the children either, Freya and Dominic go to her school now and things have never been very good between them, even before the accident. Freya and Dominic run their own ghosthunters show online and when Ava belatedly realizes she left a mural on the walls of her property, she feels the need to cover it up.

A quick backstory about the town is that there’s a ghost story called Dead-Eye Saide. Sadie was a girl who was reportedly murdered hundreds of years ago, near Ava’s home if you believe the stories. Stories claim that her eyes were carved out of her. They say if you see Sadie, it means you’re going to die…soon! The ghost story plays a large part in the story and I was all for it!

Anyway, Ava is determined to cover up her mural before it appears on the Millers’ ghosthunter show and she is ridiculed for her artwork, when on the way to it, she finds a dead body…with the eyes carved out!

I was very much hooked from the get-go with this book! It was super creepy and chilling as Ava starts to see things. Quick glimpses of shadowy figures who aren’t there at a second glance. Times where she swears she’s seeing a girl with dark hollows in place of her eyes. Is it Sadie? Or is Ava just seeing things? I absolutely love when this happens in a book! Why, I don’t know. It’s positively terrifying, but I guess because I’m reading it I can enjoy it more than if it were a movie. I’d be downright terrified to see this as a movie without it having been a book first! Lol.

This book was so spine-tingling horrifying in some ways! Not only do we have a murder mystery, one that looks like a ghost is the murderer—which you can never really say is far-fetched in books today—but there are possible leads to a true haunting too.

What drew me in even more was the romance, because yes folks, there was a romance. Ava and Dominic Miller. Yup, a Miller! I won’t get into how they were drawn together that first time, but when Ava is needing help on her final art project, Dominic is somehow the one to give her some advice. I wouldn’t call them downright enemies, but with the bad blood between their families and the fact that Ava and his sister, Freya were archrivals for the art competition just spun up loads of tension and hostility between the two. And yet, they have these moments where they find they have common interests and things just kind of take off from there, ever so slowly. I love a good slow-burn romance and these two had that in spades!

The mystery element was done exceedingly well. I can honestly say, I did not see this one coming! I thought I had my whodunit and it was a good suspect, a very good one and I had motive and opportunity, but then that theory was blown out of the water when the real killer was revealed. My jaw dropped! And then it dropped further as the story wove into its epic conclusion, because this conclusion was Epic, with a capital E!

Kat Ellis has blown things out of the water with her latest horror novel, Burden Falls! It’s an edgy, eerie mystery read that is perfect for this time of year! If you love a good chilling ghost story with suspense and a mystery to keep you guessing until the very end, this is the book for you!

 

Overall Rating 5/5 stars