REVIEW:

Hey, I get it. Reviews for series installments when you haven’t read the first book can be pretty uninteresting, so I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.

If you enjoy thrillers/police procedurals/FBI profiler stories, do yourself a favor and turn that bus back around to scoop up The Cipher, book #1 in Isabella Maldonado’s Nina Guerrera series. A Different Dawn is only book #2! You can still catch up!

What you’ll get in both books is an extremely fast-paced huntin’-for-a-serial-killer plot, lead by an intriguing Latina female main character, written by an #ownvoices author who is a retired crime fighter herself. I would not recommend pressing the FF button and starting with this second book though, because Maldonado wastes zero pages bringing newbies up to speed and just presses the gas pedal hard to accelerate this story about a Leap Year killer on the loose. Much of the action here takes place in Phoenix, which was a nice change of pace.

Now for some good news: Both books are currently available on Kindle Unlimited and include WhisperSync for those who may prefer the audiobook format.

Which leads to the bad news: Kindle Unlimited books are hard to find at libraries. Yours may have a paperback or two, but none will have ebooks or audiobooks to lend. Boo.

If you’re intrigued enough at this point to consider starting the series with The Cipher, my previous review of it can be found here.

But either way, I’ll leave you with this: A Netflix film adaptation is still in the works with Jennifer Lopez (52) attached to play Nina (28). Cool, cool.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

For nearly thirty years a serial killer has been hiding in plain sight. So has the key to an FBI agent’s dark past.

A family is murdered as they sleep. FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera and her new team are tasked with determining whether there is any link between this attack and another triple homicide from four years earlier and more than two thousand miles away. In the process, they’ll discover a serial killer so cunning that his grisly trail of death spanning nearly three decades has gone undetected. Each crime scene reminds Nina of the ghostly Latin folktale of La Llorona, which terrified her when she was an abandoned and vulnerable child. Now it’s back to haunt her.

Nina has known evil, but these macabre reenactments are as disturbing as they are baffling. Now she must uncover the meaning behind the rituals as the evidence leads her in an unexpected direction — far closer to home than anyone could have imagined. As the team narrows in on a suspect, the present collides with Nina’s past in a twist of fate that forces her to make the ultimate sacrifice.