Alone in the Wild by Kelley Armstrong

SYNOPSIS

Every season in Rockton seems to bring a new challenge. At least that's what Detective Casey Duncan has felt since she decided to call this place home.

Between all the secretive residents, the sometimes-hostile settlers outside, and the surrounding wilderness, there's always something to worry about.

While on a much needed camping vacation with her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, Casey hears a baby crying in the woods.

​The sound leads them to a tragic scene: a woman buried under the snow, murdered, a baby still alive in her arms.

A town that doesn’t let anyone in under the age of eighteen, Rockton must take care of its youngest resident yet while solving another murder and finding out where the baby came from - and whether she's better off where she is.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong again delivers an engaging, tense thriller set in perhaps the most interesting town in all of contemporary crime fiction. 

Synopsis from Goodreads

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PERSONAL REVIEW

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for sending me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are completely my own. 

I'm a steadfast Kelley Armstrong fan (Canadian? Strong female protagonists in every story? Paranormal romances? Yes, please!) and I've been fully enjoying her Rockton series. This hidden community in the Yukon is such a cool concept, especially after I had the chance to visit the Yukon this summer. It's actually surreal how many isolated or uninhabited places there are, and my husband and I had more than one discussion about how easy it would be for someone to hide out for years! As this is now the 5th book in the series, I was excited to see what would happen next for Casey, Eric, and Rockton. 

Solid Character Development 
I really felt like we finally saw some growth from Casey in this book! It's prequel, Watcher in the Woods, fell flat for me in some ways because Casey had stopped growing. We just weren't seeing any change in her or her relationships, so Alone in the Woods was a happy change to this! Casey is forced to rely on people she normally wouldn't trust (umm, hi Jen?) and has to comfort her own inability to have children, something that was taken from her in the past and she now confronts the reality of it. It's truly heartbreaking to watch her come to terms with things in her life that she doesn't have the ability to change. That said, it was amazing (as always) to see how Dalton continues to be the perfect mate for her and always knows the right thing to say (which isn't easy in a lot of the situations that Casey finds herself in). 

Finally Some Changes in Rockton 
Don't get me wrong, the hidden city idea is still really cool, but throwing a baby into the mix is such a great way to stir things up and really see how the community it forced to adapt in a short amount of time. It was also a great way to see secondary characters in a new way. I do wish we had spent more time with April because her and Casey's relationship has so much further to heal, but overall, it was really great to see characters like Phil and Jen in a slightly different light. We also spent a lot of time with different settler groups and I LOVE seeing how these other populations are living. Armstrong does an excellent job in transitioning the story away from Rockton, while still keeping the city as it's core.

Felt Like a Stronger Story 
This was such a breath of fresh air after the killers we were reading about in the previous books. Although there is still murder to solve (it's Rockton, what else can we expect?), there's a lot of other development happening, including slowly coming to unravel the mysteries around the hostiles and what made them this way, which is amazing because that's been a background mystery over the last few books, so I loved getting more insight this time. While I do lament not spending any time with Jacob in this book, I really enjoyed getting to see so much more about the other communities outside of Rockton and the transition into problems that happen outside the city. 

Overall, this was an excellent book and I'm so excited for it to come out so that we can all talk about it some more! I'd highly recommend Alone in the Woods to anyone who is loving the Rockton series, is a fan of thrillers and romance, or a fan of Kelley Armstrong. Alone in the Wild comes out February 4, 2020 and I can't wait to hear what you think about it!

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FINAL RATING: 4.5/5