Stephen Gallagher in The Washington Times
We’ve shortened the review just a bit to avoid copyright violation, but couldn’t be happier with this review, fresh from the pages of The Washington Times:
“Bowing to the tradition confirmed by the classic Modern Library anthology ‘Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural’ (one of the sacred texts of my adolescent reading years), I draw your attention first to a non-ghostly, yet eminently scary terror tale.
The Painted Bride (Subterranean Press, $40, 181 pages) is veteran thriller-writer Stephen Gallagher’s tense melodrama spun from the mysterious disappearance of auto dealer Frank Tanner’s wife Carol, the stalled police investigation into Frank’s possible guilt — and the complications ensuing from the obsessive actions of Carol’s burnt-out, former drug-taking younger sister Molly, who knows Frank did away with his wife, and devotes her dwindling energies to protecting the children now in his care and bringing him to justice…
There’s even a hint of the supernatural in an endangered child’s anguished outcry: ‘He killed my mother and now he won’t die.’ It’s a neat capstone to an accomplished and suitably unpleasant shocker.”