*I received a free ARC of Hanover House from Selfpublished via Netgalley in exchange of an honest and unbiased review*

Hanover House by Brenda Novak
Published by Selfpublished on 1 September 2015
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Psychological Thriller,Romance, Suspense
Pages: 198
Format: eARC
Source: Netgalley


Reading Challenges: Summer COYER 2015

Welcome to Hanover House….

Psychiatrist Evelyn Talbot has dedicated her life to solving the mysteries of the psychopathic mind. Why do psychopaths act as they do? How do they come to be? Why don’t they feel any remorse for the suffering they cause? And are there better ways of spotting and stopping them?

After having been kidnapped, tortured and left for dead when she was just a teenager—by her high school boyfriend—she’s determined to understand how someone she trusted so much could turn on her. So she’s established a revolutionary new medical health center in the remote town of Hilltop, Alaska, where she studies the worst of the worst.

But not everyone in Hilltop is excited to have Hanover House and its many serial killers in the area. Alaskan State Trooper, Sergeant Amarok, is one of them. And yet he can’t help feeling bad about what Evelyn has been through. He’s even attracted to her. Which is partly why he worries.

He knows what could happen if only one little thing goes wrong…

Hanover House is really, really creepy! And well written with an amazing main character who has been through hell, and now wants to help figure out what it is that makes a psychopath. Filled with suspense and a little romance, this prequel definitely made me want more!

My Hanover House review:

From the very start of Hanover House, I was in awe of Evelyn! Instead of hiding and not confronting her fears after she was brutally attacked by her boyfriend when she was only sixteen, she went on to become a psychiatrist to try to find out what exactly it is that makes some people psychopaths. And she wanted to further her research to see if there was any possibility at all to try to find psychopaths before they did too much harm to those around them. The way she went about it was to get funding for a high security prison, where she would transfer serial killers who showed no remorse for their crimes, so that she could study them. When she was finally able to build her prison outside Anchorage, the local population wasn’t exactly happy with her. But she was determined to find out why Jasper had become the way he was, why he had killed her three best friends before he attacked her and made her stay in a living hell until he slit her throat and left her for death.

Evelyn definitely has some baggage, but she won’t let that stop her from making sure Hanover House will open, even if the one law enforcement officer in Hilltop, Amorak, was not happy about the new prison being built in his village, either. And plenty was gong out both in Hilltop and in Boston, where Evelyn was tying up loose ends, selling her condo and getting ready to move. Jasper being on the lose, but without anyone knowing his whereabouts made Evelyn on edge, and with very good reason! The psychological thriller aspect of Hanover House was so well done! Especially because some of it was narrated showing Jasper, and his inner thoughts as well. This prequel definitely whetted my appetite, and I’m sad I’ll have to wait almost a full year before the full novel in this series will be released.

Written in third person point of view, past tense, the narrator mostly followed Evelyn and her thoughts and feelings, with some extremely chilling insights to Jasper as well. Well written, with characters I want to get to know much better, Hanover House has a lot of promise!

Some of my favorite Hanover House quotes:

To hide the fear that slithered, snake-like, just below her skin, making the hair on her arms stand up, Evelyn paced across one end of the small, concrete cell, pretending to be absorbed in her notes.

Although she told herself that the same thing wouldn’t happen twice, no amount of self-talk could overcome the emotional response that welled up whenever the slightest sound, smell or other trigger reminded her of what Jasper Moore had done twenty years ago.

Jasper Moore had changed his identity several times over the years.