Book Review: Lying Season (Experiment in Terror #4)First, I want to thank Karina Halle for brightening a totally craptastic day. I was having a rotten, no good afternoon at work, but when I came home and found the UPS package sitting on my computer chair containing Lying Season, it became a million times better. I wanted to read it all in one sitting, but the holidays made that difficult, so I had to survive on small chunks at a time until I could finally devote an entire evening to ripping through it. It was totally worth the wait.

I’m not going to recap all of the previous reviews, by now you should be reading the Experiment in Terror series anyway. If you’re not, start with  Darkhouse, which is only $0.99 on Amazon for the Kindle (free to borrow for Prime members),  and come back when you’ve finished that. This review is for those who have already made their way through the first three books of the series. Don’t worry, I’ll still be careful not to spoil anything for you.

For those who read the incredibly awesome third installment, Dead Sky Morning, you’ll recall that things got really intense between Perry and Dex. I mean more intense than usual. Alas, Dex still went back to his annoying Wine Babe girlfriend Jenn, and while we were given a hint of payoff to cut the tension, I still wanted so much more. By the end of Lying Season, I simultaneously wanted to both hug the book close and say “thank you!” and throw it across the room screaming “how dare you?!?” The ending was psychotically brilliant, and that’s all I’m going to say about it because anything else would give away an integral part of the plot that you really want to reach on your own.

I’m jumping way ahead though, talking about the ending before the beginning. In Lying Season, Perry has to face her most frightening experience yet. Forget the creepy lighthouse, the insane skin-walkers, or the diabolical leper colony ghosts- this time Perry has to spend a week staying with Dex and the Wine Babe wench. Oh, there are totally scary scenes in the mental hospital that Perry and Dex investigate (one of which will give me nightmares tonight I’m sure), but watching Perry watch Dex and Jenn interact as a couple was definitely more chilling and occasionally heart-wrenching.

This was definitely a turning-point installment in the series, a crux that will change everything from here on out. Karina provided some answers to burning questions while raising new questions, took Dex and Perry’s relationship to whole new levels before violently smashing them into a metaphorical brick wall at full-speed, and basically left me thinking that Spring of 2012 is a very, very long way off. Every time I finish one of the Experiment in Terror books, I get that psychosomatic itchiness that comes from a sudden feeling of withdrawal.