by Stephen Mertz
2002 Four Winds
A single mother moves to a small town which is being plagued by violence. Her son and her author neighbor love interest seek to find the truth.
A good example of how a novel can change genres by turning various elements up and down. The first half reads like a Zebra Horror novel with the murders cut out - there's a serial killer, but it's all in the background. There's a bunch of foreshadowing things like a haunted house, a psycho ex-husband, and evil native American spirits before settling down half way through.
The second half is more of a thriller, which is a weird middle category in itself - not scary enough for horror, not enough fighting for action, not enough mystery for mystery. There's a dash of hinted supernatural in the form of a wolf who might be a reincarnated wise man.
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The official category for Night Wind is romantic suspense, of all things. Not my expertise, but the only romantic elements were that the male lead was described as handsome more than once and we get a couple quick "maybe we can be more than friends one day" lines
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Reminds me of pulp stories where they'd add "her blouse ripped and you can see her boob" to an unsold story of any genre and they could sell it to the spicys. This feels like a trunk novel from a prior decade (payphones and answering machines figure in the plot, along with the obligatory "we don't get cell reception in the mountains") that got updated and tweaked for the market.
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