The Lucky Ones By Tiffany Reisz

The Lucky Ones by Tiffany Reisz is an absorbingly suspenseful mystery perfect for beach reading – just as long as you don't mind a sand angel twisting into a corpse that claws itself free to expose some rather grisly truths!

Several key scenes in this Gothically-suggestive novel actually do take place on a beach along a section of secluded Oregon coast. This Oregon setting and "The Dragon" house of retired neurosurgeon, Dr. Capello, furnish an eerily enchanting locale that is enhanced by Gothic motifs of unconventional medical procedures, a haunted – or at least haunting – house, isolation, confusion about reality, and eroticism.

Reisz expertly shapes a very real and human mystery about past and potential murders that resonate with looming urgency as her marvelously textured story progresses. The characters Reisz develops all endear themselves to each other and the reader, which is quite an accomplishment considering the disturbing underpinnings of their natures and acts. Some of the character relationships involve sexual scenes that are as intriguing as they are deliciously depicted.

I absolutely tore through this thoroughly readable novel! I enjoyed the literary allusion throughout it, too, to the extent that the ending actually inspired me to write my own epilogue (or epitaph) to The Lucky Ones since Ms. Reisz left that part to our own imaginations:

It was a dark and stormy morning in Xanadu

When Kubla Khan melted The Dragon Brain

And spun the wings of a lucky ash angel

From sands of time sunk in an infinite watery grave,

Like human tears once lost now rising

From an ocean of endless rain.