A- #BookReview: Enter the Nightmare by Jayne Castle

Enter the Nightmare (Harmony, #18) by Jayne Castle
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: action adventure romance, paranormal romance, romantic suspense, science fiction romance
Series: Harmony #18
Pages: 297
Published by Berkley on June 30, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Nightmares become real when a woman trying to rebuild her life enters the Hotel of Dreams in this exhilarating Harmony novel by New York Times bestselling author Jayne Castle.

Alice Radstone should have known not to return. Her life before the Hotel of Dreams had been the perfectly cloistered world of a teacher at the Ballantine Academy. When the death of her mentor forced her out, she was left to reinvent herself in the big city. Since then, things have not gone well. Ten months ago, after her first trip to the hotel, she woke up in the locked ward of a hospital for the criminally insane, told that she had murdered her husband on their wedding night. She has no memory of the husband or the wedding but after escaping the asylum, one thing is certain—she is never going back.

Unfortunately, Alice’s second reinvented life is also deteriorating rapidly, which is why she finds herself once again at the Hotel of Dreams—this time hiding in the shadows of her room, a dead body in the shower, and two men wearing masks creeping toward the bed to kidnap her. Again.

When the enigmatic and decidedly dangerous Owen March shows up, claiming he’s there to rescue her, she has no choice but to accept his offer—and hope that he doesn’t intend to kidnap her, too.

With Alice and now Owen in the killer’s sights, time is running out. Alice and Owen must trust each other and the electric passion between them if they are to make it out of this hotel alive.

My Review:

We first meet Alice Radstone while she’s in the middle of escaping from the ultimate escape room. She’s hiding in the bathroom of her suite at the Hotel of Dreams with the dead body behind the shower curtain, watching two goons stab a line of pillows taking the place of what would otherwise have been her body.

Her dead body.

Alice was lured to the spooky, out-of-the-way hotel THIS time with the promise of proof about her previous visit. On what was supposed to have been her honeymoon to a man she barely remembers meeting. A honeymoon night that resulted in him throwing himself off the hotel’s roof before Alice was sedated – for her own good, of course – and shipped off to an asylum.

A place where she was supposed to be kept drugged and pliant for the rest of her life. Because she drove her new husband to his death with her psychic powers and she’s too dangerous to be allowed out. EVER.

There are a few, just a few, truths mixed in with that pack of lies. Because this is the planet Harmony, where a significant portion of the human population really does have psychic powers, the most outlandish part of the story is more plausible than it might otherwise be.

Alice does have the power to drive someone to suicide by opening their mind up to their worst nightmare. But she didn’t – at least not in this particular case. Instead, someone has dumped Alice into her very own nightmare for reasons that she had no clue about the first time she visited the Hotel of Dreams.

But she does now. And she’s determined to get to the bottom of the nightmarish mess that has stolen months of her life, her reputation, and her freedom.

All she has to do is trust Owen March, the mysterious man who says he has come to save her from the goons. Alice is sure her own instincts about people are shot after what she’s been through, but her dust bunny Sebastian thinks March is trustworthy. So she will too. After all, on Harmony, the dust bunnies are usually right.

Escape Rating A-: I’m here for the dust bunnies. No, seriously, I mean it. The Harmony series (sometimes referred to as the Ghost Hunters series) has been taken over by the dust bunnies, and I’m absolutely here for it. You will be too.

But it didn’t start out that way, and neither did the planet of Harmony. It’s a former colony planet that lost contact with its planet of origin. Earth. When their imported high-tech failed after they lost their way home, the colonists did what humans do. They made do with what they had. They hunkered down through some dark times.

They survived.

Now, two centuries later, they’ve built themselves back up to a level of technology and civilization roughly equivalent to our own 21st century. But with a difference.

Many of the colonists who came to Harmony possessed psychic powers – even if their Earth disclaimed any such possibility. (It’s through this vector that the author’s Harmony series connects with her Arcane Society series written under her Amanda Quick and Jayne Ann Krentz bylines).

The planet itself nurtures and enhances those psychic talents, so the colonists have become more powerful and their talents have developed more facets as the humans survived, intermarried, and eventually prospered.

There’s a lot of lovely, glorious and frequently nefarious politicking and general skullduggery threaded through the entire ‘Jayneverse’ – and parts of that come to play in this entry in the series. But it all really does stand alone if you want to start here. (I’m fascinated with this kind of interwoven history, but if you’re not or you’re looking for a way in, here is just fine.)

The dust bunnies are native to Harmony, and they’re just the best, cutest, and most adorable little predators. Sebastian steals every scene he’s in, and that’s true of every dust bunny in the series.

Like many stories in the series, Enter the Nightmare is the story of two people on the run from powerful figures who are determined to silence them for reasons that are unknown to them as the story begins.

They bond because they’re stuck in whatever-it-is together, whether by choice or chance or in this case, a bit of both. And the only way out is through. Through the case at least, although they eventually figure out that they’ll never be through with each other. And that dust bunny Sebastian will be bringing all of his many, many dust bunny friends over for pizza for the rest of ALL of their lives.

This was a case of the right book at the right time for this reader. I needed a distraction, and something I could read in pieces and remain invested in the story. I saw the romance coming – because there’s always a romance in this series – but I enjoyed watching them figure it out AND figure out what was happening to them, why it was happening, and how to get ahead of everyone else’s plots and plans for them and their demise.

So I’m already looking forward to the next book in the delightful and suspenseful interconnected ‘Jayneverse’. That next book will be The Book Hunter, coming in January. It’s the follow up to The Shop on Hidden Lane, where psychic dog Bruce stole THAT show every bit as thoroughly as Sebastian did this one.

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