An unsettling investigation teaches two deeply suspicious people how to trust in the next thrilling novel of the Lost Night Files trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz.

Amelia Rivers, a member of the Lost Night Files podcast team, hires private investigator Gideon Sweetwater to catch the stalker who has been watching her. Amelia suspects the stalker may be connected to the shadowy organization responsible for the night that she and her two friends lost to amnesia—a night that upended their lives and left them with paranormal talents.

Gideon suspects that Amelia is either paranoid or an outright con artist, but he can’t resist the chemistry between them. He takes the case despite his skepticism. For her part, Amelia has second thoughts about the wisdom of employing the mysterious Mr. Sweetwater. She is wary of the powerful attraction between them, and deeply uneasy about the nightmarish paintings on the walls of his home. She senses they were inspired by his own dreamscapes.

Amelia knows she doesn’t have time to find another investigator, and Gideon is forced to reckon with the truth when he disrupts what was intended to be Amelia’s kidnapping. Now the pair is on the run, with no choice but to return to the haunting ruins of the old hotel where Amelia’s lost night occurred. They are desperate to stop a killer and the people who are conducting illegal experiments with a dangerous drug that is designed to enhance psychic abilities. If they are to survive, they will have to trust each other and the passion that bonds them.

My Review:

The Lost Night Files, the podcast at the center of this series, began after three women, Pallas Llewellyn, Talia March and Amelia Rivers, all lost a night, together, in the crumbling ruins of the old Lucent Springs Hotel.

They all believed that they were there for a job. Their combined specialties would be ideal for working on the rehabilitation of the formerly grand hotel and spa into a thing of beauty as well as a destination resort.

After being drugged, experimented upon, nearly killed in an out-of-control fire and/or crushed by an earthquake – all in the same night – and then, of course, disbelieved by the local cops, they banded together to give themselves, well, a job. Just an entirely different job than the one they thought they were being interviewed for.

Together, they started the podcast, searching for answers. Over the course of the series, beginning with Sleep No More and continuing with The Night Island, they found some of their answers – as well as other victims of the same nefarious operation – AND a whole hell of a lot more questions. Not to mention links back to the Bluestone Project behind the mysterious events at Fogg Lake that were explored in The Vanishing, All the Colors of Night, and Lightning in a Mirror.

Also, what look like happy ever afters for Pallas (Sleep No More) and Talia (The Night Island).

This time around its Amelia Rivers’ turn – in more ways than one.

It doesn’t take Amelia’s enhanced paranormal senses, courtesy of that mysterious experiment, for her to realize that someone is watching her. But her senses do give her the tools she needs to photograph and possibly even identify her stalker – at least in the paranormal spectrum where her talent manifests.

But Amelia’s talents as a photographer, whether paranormal or mundane, don’t exactly give her the tools she needs to hunt down someone who really is out to get her. (It’s not paranoia if it’s real, and this is very, very real indeed.)

Which is where private investigator Gideon Sweetwater comes in. Or will if Amelia decides she can trust him to be open-minded about her case. Little does Amelia know that Gideon’s mind was opened LONG before Amelia ever walked into his life. Not because he was part of the experiment, but rather because paranormal talents have been part of the Sweetwater family for generations.

And it’s his uncle’s misguided attempt to find more people like their family that started this whole entire mess. And might just end them all.

Escape Rating A-: Welcome to the ‘Jayneverse’ a place where psychic powers and paranormal talents hide in plain sight in some very surprising times and people and places – when they bother to hide at all.

Everything connects up eventually, from the 19th century Arcane Society, where the rationalization of the Industrial Revolution forced those talents underground – and gave rise to some seriously mad scientists – to the 20th and 21st century of this series and its predecessor Fogg Lake where those talents are hidden to keep the talented from being labelled as crackpots – to the far flung future of humanity out in the stars where paranormal talents are not merely accepted by downright required for survival on the lost colony of Harmony.

Howsomever, just because this book, and the trilogy it’s a part of, is part of a much broader tapestry, that does not mean that you can’t dive in right here – because you absolutely can. The links between the individual series and subseries are loose and tangential. If you know what came before – and after – it gives the story just a touch more resonance, but each book gives more than enough hints to pick up what has already happened in ITS subseries. Not that the links to other times and places aren’t irresistible – because they are. Just that you don’t have to know the ins and outs of all of those links to become immersed in the one that you have in your hands at the time.

That being said, Shattering Dawn is the wrap up of The Lost Night Files, and it does work better if you start with Sleep No More so that you’re right there with the fans of the podcast when Amelia needs them to rescue her – not that Gideon isn’t already working on that little problem.

What makes this story, and this series, so much fun is that there are always multiple strings to the author’s bow. So to speak.

The primary story is always the mystery to be solved, and in the case of The Lost Night Files it’s a doozy. Pallas, Talia and now Amelia have been pulling at the threads of that mystery from the very beginning. They know they’re closing in on the truth – and Amelia is certain that the truth is closing in on her as well.

Part of what makes this story such a page turner are the wheels within wheels of that truth. Amelia and her friends are not the only victims in a race to a deadly finish. There are conflicting and hidden motives on all sides, with each party having its own idea of what the endgame should be and who should be permitted to walk away from it.

At the same time, the heartbeat of this story, like the rest of the series, is the burgeoning romance between Amelia and Gideon. They begin by not trusting themselves or each other, and their steps towards even a possible alliance are hesitant and yet still every bit as hot as the power they wield separately – and even more explosively together.

I had a marvelous time reading Shattering Dawn – as I have with all of this author’s work, especially in the Jayneverse. Now that The Lost Night Files have found their answers, I’m looking forward to her next, It Takes a Psychic, written under her Jayne Castle pen name and set in fantastic, futuristic Harmony. If I’m really lucky, the story will even feature an intrepid Dust Bunny or two. I can’t wait to find out!

The disappearance of a mysterious informant leads two people desperate for answers to an island of deadly deception in this new novel in the Lost Night Files trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz.   Talia March, Pallas Llewellyn, and Amelia Rivers, bonded by a night they all have no memory of, are dedicated to uncovering the mystery of what really happened to them months ago—an experience that brought out innate psychic abilities in each of them. The women suspect they were test subjects years earlier, and that there are more people like them—all they have to do is find the list. When Talia follows up on a lead from Phoebe, a fan of the trio’s podcast, she discovers that the informant has vanished.   Talia isn’t the only one looking for Phoebe, however. Luke Rand, a hunted and haunted man who is chasing the same list that Talia is after, also shows up at the meeting place. It’s clear he has his own agenda, and they are instantly suspicious of each other. But when a killer begins to stalk them, they realize they have to join forces to find Phoebe and the list.   The rocky investigation leads Talia and Luke to a rustic, remote retreat on Night Island in the Pacific Northwest. The retreat promises to rejuvenate guests with the Unplugged Experience. Upon their arrival, Talia and Luke discover guests are quite literally cut off from the outside world because none of their high-tech devices work on the island. It soon becomes clear that Phoebe is not the first person to disappear into the strange gardens that surround the Unplugged Experience retreat. And then the first mysterious death occurs…

My Review:

All of The Lost Night Files begin before the first book in this ongoing series opens to its very first page in Sleep No More. In fact, it’s starting to look like The Lost Night Files begins at the same time and with the same perpetrators – yes, let’s go with perpetrators – as the Fogg Lake series that began with The Vanishing.

All of which began with a top secret government project codenamed Bluestone. A project that absolutely went where the X-Files did but left considerably more damage – both direct and collateral – in its wake. A project that the government CLEARLY didn’t bother to clean up after. They just mothballed the whole thing in various situs and hoped that no one would dig into their dirty little paranormal secrets.

Like things EVER work that way.

In this second book, or rather this second case for the Lost Night Files podcast, the founders of the podcast; Pallas Llewellyn, whose story was featured in Sleep No More, Amelia Rivers, who will probably be the central character of a third book that had better be happening, and Talia March, the protagonist of THIS story, have a lead on why and how they were targeted for the experiment that ramped up their various strong intuitions into full-blown psychic talents.

They all took a test that measured psychic ability back in college, and they all scored high on that test. That test WAS the only link between them before their ‘lost night’ at the dilapidated Lucent Springs Hotel.

Now Talia is running down a lead on someone who is selling copies of the results of that old, supposedly long-forgotten test. Talia has high hopes that the list will lead to others who lost a night just as they did, giving them a trail they can hopefully follow back to the source of this mess.

What Talia finds first is another ‘victim’ of the experiments. Prickly and justifiably paranoid Luke Rand also took that test, also lost a night in eerily similar conditions to the Lost Night Files crew, and also woke up with newly enhanced paranormal talents and no memory of what was done to him.

Although Luke has one memory that Talia and her friends are fortunate not to have. The first thing he remembers after his lost night is standing over two dead bodies with a scalpel in his hands. He thinks he did it.

Talia’s not so sure about that. What she is sure about, because her talent is finding things, is that the person who was supposed to be selling them that list isn’t at the rendezvous – and neither is the list. What Talia does find is a talisman that links her to the would-be seller, and clues to where the woman was taken.

For experimentation, just as they were.

Reluctant and temporary allies, Luke and Talia band together to follow the trail of the seller, the list itself, and whatever operation is experimenting on would-be psychics. What they find is a huge con, a nightmare garden, and a series of murders that make Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None look like a walk in the park on a beautiful sunny day.

What Talia and Luke also find, in spite of themselves and their mutual antipathy and distrust – is a partnership that will save them, both from the monsters that haunt the Night Island, and from the demons conjured up by the experiment within them both.

Escape Rating A-: The thing about the ‘Jayneverse’ is that everything connects up – EVENTUALLY. Howsomever, that doesn’t stop a reader from jumping in pretty much anywhere and getting sucked right in. The Lost Night Files is an excellent case in point.

It might be better to start The Lost Night Files with ITS OWN first book, Sleep No More, but this series doesn’t depend on any knowledge of the greater whole, or even the smaller whole of Fogg Lake, to be easy to get into and a whole lot of fun to read.

It’s more that if you ARE familiar with some of the background there are bits that you read with a bit of a smile at the old memories – even as you make new ones.

The Night Island is clearly a middle book in its own series. In Sleep No More, we first met the crew of the podcast and were with them as they continued their investigation into WTF happened to them at the old Lucent Springs Hotel. AND discovered that they weren’t the only ones to have been experimented on, resulting in Pallas’ finding her HEA with fellow experiment subject Ambrose Drake.

In and on the Night Island, the investigation gets a few steps closer to the truth – or at least A TRUTH – about the nature of the experiments and their purpose. The reader gets a glimpse of the perpetrators, while Talia and Luke get merely a hint in that direction. Which moves the series as a whole along quite teasingly, but doesn’t detract or distract from the events of this book.

Events that are centered around Talia and Luke’s investigation of the Night Island itself, the way the bodies keep dropping like flies and the bizarre nature of the experimental flora on Night Island and how they seem to be evolving their way to fauna at a dizzying rate.

So there are oodles of puzzles to solve in this compelling story of paranormal romantic suspense and plenty of tasty red herrings to swallow on the way to solving them – as well as the descriptions of the chef’s yummy-sounding vegetarian cuisine. Talia and Luke turn out to be the perfect investigators for this case of con artists, psychic assassins and lost things, plans and people.

I can’t wait to see how The Lost Night Files wraps up all the mysteries that face them, hopefully in the next book in this series. And hopefully this time next year if not a bit sooner!