Red Days and Grey Nights by Brandon CollierMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Pepper is an attractive young woman from Britain who is kidnapped while on a Caribbean holiday with her friends. Her kidnapper is a sadistic and cruel criminal who runs the main sex slave operation on the island. From the first few pages of the book I was rooting for Pepper and found the very many descriptions of what happened to her and the other victims a very difficult read. There is much more to empathise with Pepper about but that would spoil the plot.
The villain, Don, is a most despicable man who engendered many very un-Christian feelings towards him from this reader. You hope and wish throughout this rather long, and sometimes rambling, thriller that he will get his just desserts. Most of the characters are well written and believable and the multiple scenes of violence and sex are not gratuitous, given the appalling situations in which the poor women find themselves. It is not a story for young or overly sensitive readers. Having said that, I found that many of the descriptions of incidents, or events in the novel came across to me as too mechanical, and rather like a newspaper article about such an evil trade. They seemed lacking in the subtle nuances that can add to the expressive effects of a description. It made me think of a colouring book that was still to be coloured in. Overall this is an exciting, if harrowing, story that is full of incident and action with an ending that is satisfying, but is also a tale of transformation about Pepper’s personality.
Because of the great number of chapters it would have benefitted a lot from a digitally workable Table of Contents in the front matter of the book.
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