Review of “Into the Storm” by DJ Adamson

Score: 87/100 (8.7 out of 10)

A wind storm (tornado) rips through Pinkerton in Circlegold County. There's a sighting of a large, terrifying creature by a kid named Jake. Bill Cahill, a former NASA employee, is found badly injured and taken to a hospital. There are reports of deer in the area being found dead and mutilated, mirroring incidents in other places where cows were found mutilated. To make matters worse, people have gone missing and believed to be in great danger!

Are aliens involved?

Sheriff Boggs, Officer Hayworth, and Major Sears are in a race against time to find these missing people and get to the bottom of all this craziness. A strange individual named Ted Templeton is the primary suspect, seen as one capable of kidnapping and killing children. The investigation is constantly sidetracked by Police Chief Purvis Moore and Dr. Cleatus Potter who either have greater insight into what's going on or are hiding something....

If you're thinking to yourself that this sounds like A LOT, it sorta is. However, there's some enjoyment you can derive from it anyway.

Into the Storm by DJ Adamson is a sci-fi/crime thriller with mystery and paranormal elements. It is a suspenseful novel that may push you out of your comfort zone and possibly give you several hours of entertainment depending on the kind of reader you are.

Despite what we initially expected to be a silly, lighthearted story written just for the fun of it, you quickly realize that this book is incredibly DARK. There is shocking amount of extreme violence and sexual assault in here. There's also some language including a few F-bombs and the “R” word being used. There's even a suicide in here. So, right off the bat you realize this isn't War of the Worlds or The Iron Giant—sci-fi books that can comfortably be read by people of all ages. This is definitely intended for adults who can take edgier content.

DJ Adamson has a policy of making life as terrible as possible for her characters, and she succeeded! In a previous book, she had a recovering alcoholic be waterboarded with vodka, so author-wise she's a modern-day Dante Alighieri. It really is a good policy overall since it forces you into the characters' corners and draws sympathy from the reader.

There are a few other issues with this book beside the edgy content and convoluted plot. First of all, this book is formatted in some sort of encrypted, coded way. That means that if you try to copy and paste from it (like while taking notes or quoting it), you'll get gibberish. The same with if you try to play it as speech-to-text, it'll come out as gibberish. We've actually never seen that before. Ever. We reached out to the author via multiple e-mail accounts to ask her for a different copy but received no reply. So, we tried to use the Kindle version which at least appears readable. Another problem is that there is some room to be desired in terms of proofreading/editing. That's why we wished we could copy and paste from the document without it coming out as code from The Matrix so that way we could take note of specific sentences that were written wrong. One example is “I thought we were all were done for.” There are a few instances of that happening. Unfortunately, because of the problem described earlier, we had two choices: try to remember it or take a screenshot.

UPDATE: We actually did receive a reply from the author after this review and the problem with our ability to read the file was fixed. We've provided a slight ratings boost.

Keep in mind, it is unlikely the problems above will actually affect your reading experience. It is more pertinent to judging and reviewing than it is to casual reading.

This book is creative. It's ambitious. It takes chances. There are plenty of twists, turns, and red-herrings. You could really end up enjoying this book.

Check it out on Amazon!