‘Alone in the Woods’ by Charly Cox is the third book in the Detective Alyssa Wyatt series, set in Albuquerque New Mexico. This is a series that you can read separately so is great as a standalone. Even I have missed one book up to now.

Teenagers Addis Kensington and Emerson Childress are 17 and have been best friends for that long that if any of them got in trouble they would go to the other girls house to stay until things calmed down again. One evening Addis does just this and plans to stay at Emersons until it blows over. They find they have to nip back to Addis’s for some extra stuff for the sleepover.

They don’t expect to see both of Addis’s parents brutally murdered and both go into shock after seeing this horrific sight. They don’t realise that it isn’t just them in the house there is someone else and the girls are kidnapped there and then. Detective Alyssa Wyatt and her partner Detective Cord Roberts along with their team are called out urgently to investigate the double murder and to hopefully find the two girls, but will they be able to find them before it becomes 4 murders and not 2? Why have they been taken?

I found this new instalment of Alyssa’s compulsive and intriguing reading. Told from multiple viewpoints so we get to know what is happening and who is who pretty quickly. I had my heart in my mouth at times for sure, a twisty and adrenaline-inducing read as I always find with a Charly Cox book. I was certainly silently hoping Alyssa would find the girls and the perpetrator as soon as she could. The tension had me flipping the pages as fast as I could to find out what would happen next.

The characters in this series are fully fleshed out to the point that I feel connected to Alyssa whenever I pick up a new Charly Cox Alyssa book and will continue to do so as the stories are as fresh as the first.

Thanks to Books On The Bright Side Publicity, Hera Books and NetGalley for the copy of the book.