Island Endgame
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback
Ages: 18+
An isolated island. A grieving nurse, struggling to heal. Three desperate fugitives taking hostages. Can she outwit them and survive?
Guilt-ridden over the drowning death of her nine-year-old nephew, Kenzie Adams flees her nursing job at a major city hospital to work at a primitive but picturesque island summer camp. Hopefully a few low-stress months away from the city will help steer her life back on course. But before the campers arrive, Kenzie’s second chance takes a turn to real-life terror. Three determined fugitives invade the island to search for a rumored treasure, and they threaten to kill Kenzie and the staff, including the caretaker’s young son.
Their captors have a plan … until Kenzie seizes an opportunity to escape. But with no weapons, no communications with the outside world, and mounting danger from increasingly desperate men, she’ll have to tap into unexpected strengths to save everyone before the captors deliver on their ultimatum—find treasure or die. Kenzie must learn to trust herself again, or she’ll relive her greatest nightmare, failing to save yet another child.
Island Endgame is page-turning suspense with plenty of heart, perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone and Peter Heller’s The Guide.
Reviews
Taut, sharp-edged, and impossible to forget. Hodge delivers a chilling hostage drama where survival and redemption collide. Guilt-ridden over the drowning death of her nine-year-old nephew, Kenzie Adams leaves her city hospital job for what she hopes will be a quiet summer as camp nurse on Salish Island. But before the campers even arrive, her refuge turns into a nightmare. Three fugitives land on the island in search of a rumored treasure, taking Kenzie and the staff hostage and threatening the life of the caretaker’s young son. Will she survive the ordeal? Hodge blends suspense, mystery, and shocking violence with a deeply emotional examination of grief and resilience. The novel asks what happens when the very circumstances we run from return in even more harrowing form—and how far we can go when forced to outthink danger. Salish Island may be unassuming and quiet, but in these pages it delivers a story of immense impact. With its mix of pulse-pounding suspense and emotional depth, the novel makes for an un-put-downable read.
Action Packed Island Adventure With Heart. This is one of those books that is going to be great for damn near any reader. If you’re more a women’s fiction type… well, there’s a lot of aspects of that happening here between one of our main characters coming to the island specifically over some trauma she is trying to heal from and one of our other main characters and the reasons she lives on the island permanently. Both of which play central roles in this tale. Then for the action/ adventure/ mystery crowd, suddenly the tale spins and becomes much more action/ suspense/ mystery based, with unexpected newcomers threatening to kill everyone currently on the island. Through this section – much of the rest of the book, with the relationship drama folded into this new survival/ action pacing – we get a near Atomfall / early Tomb Raider/ Lara Croft type tale wherein the islanders have to evade their captors and sneak their way around as they work to find some way back to safety. Both sides of the storytelling work well with each other, with richly detailed main characters providing a lot of the heart even as their various and conflicting motivations also lead to some of the difficulties being faced here. The Pacific Northwest island setting also plays a strong role here and Hodge describes it so wonderfully that you’ll likely want to consider vacationing out there yourself… without the drama and survival tale taking place within the setting of this particular tale. 😀 Truly an excellently written tale that works superbly on many different levels. Very much recommended.
