I love Kelley Armstrong. Her A Rip Through Time series is one of my favourites and her latest rom-com (yes, she wrote a rom-com) Finding Mr. Write is one of my best reads of the year so far. I know she writes a lot of dark stories (sometimes clearly in the realm of horror, sometimes more in the paranormal) and though horror is usually not my jam, I really wanted to give I’ll Be Waiting a chance, because if I was going to love a horror story…it would be Armstrong’s.

Nicola Laughton never expected to see adulthood, being diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a child. Then medical advances let her live into her thirties and she met Anton, who taught her to dream of a future… together. Months after they married, Anton died in a horrible car, but lived long enough to utter five words to her, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

That final private moment became public when someone from the crash scene took it to the press—the terminally ill woman holding her dying husband as he promised to wait for her on the other side. Worse, that person claimed it wasn’t Anton who said the words but his ghost, hovering over his body.

Since their story went public, Nicola has been hounded by spiritualists promising closure. In the hopes of stopping her downward spiral, friends and family find a reputable medium—a professor of parapsychology. For the séance, they rent the Lake Erie beach house that Anton’s family once owned.

The medium barely has time to begin his work before things start happening. Locked doors mysteriously open. Clouds of insects engulf the house. Nicola hears footsteps and voices and the creak of an old dumbwaiter…in an empty shaft. Throughout it all she’s haunted by nightmares of her past. Because, unbeknownst to the others, this isn’t her first time contacting the dead. And Nicola isn’t her real name.

That’s when she finds the first body…

I have very much decided that horror is not my genre—even if it’s written by one of my favourite writers. So I’m not sure my review will really do justice to anyone who regularly reads the genre. That being said, I was very into the premise at the beginning…trying to figure out what the past events were, who Nicola really was and whether she’d actually get the closure she wanted with Anton.

Fast-forward to about three-quarters of the way through the book, and it not only started to get a little bit repetitive (with the seances and the things that were happening at night) but then the book went in this totally farfetched direction that kind of took me out of the story and was more gory than I needed it to be.

That being said, the writer was beautiful, Armstrong’s character development (as always) is spot-on and the tension is there. I think this genre is just not for me—and that’s not the writer’s fault.

3 STARS

“That’s why I let myself fall into this bullshit of trying to contact Anton. Because after what happened in that forest, I cannot shake the conviction that there is life after death.” —Kelley Armstrong, I’ll Be Waiting

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.