The problem - the events at the farmhouse are in the middle of the night and the detective is walking around in the middle of the day. The last half alternates between the events at the farmhouse and the local detective poking around the area, with the cop showing up to prevent the husband from having to finish a fight. Dad stuns the farmer not once but twice and limps away without finishing him off. The farmer knows the husband is alive in the well and figures he'll dump some dirt on him later. The mother is chained to the leg of her bed - I don't care how heavy it is, it's just a damn bed, you can lift one leg up two inches (which she finally does). I don't find myself yelling at characters in books for being stupid, but everything here depends on people making bad choices.

The text was so repetitive I wasn't sure if I swiped the right direction on my tablet - you can flip a handful of pages and it's still the same thought. There's an entire half chapter of the cop recapping the investigation to his wife. No suspense, no tension, just pages and pages of back story and repetition. I was shocked to find this came out like a month before Stephen King's Misery, as this is a pale shadow of it. He spends several chapters crawling his way back up while the two girls play and the farmer rapes the mother.ĭad crawls out of the well and attempts a rescue, with a local cop swooping in to save the day at the last minute. The missing woman's husband looks for her and does a better job than the cops until he finds the farmhouse and gets tossed down a well. Usually these things build up, but we're in a hurry, so we go straight to locked rooms and chains around the ankles.

The house is occupied by a woman insane with grief over her lost child, her sociopathic husband, and their intellectually disabled daughter. A woman's car breaks down and she's forced to take refuge at a creepy house with her daughter - a premise so hokey it was the stuff of parodies from at least the 1930s.

Playmates by Andrew Neiderman