Alexandra Sokoloff is in a class of her own. Her MOON series reads as if it is taken from the pages of reality and leaves me so fired up I have to remind myself it is a novel. She is on my MUST READ list and if you love nitty gritty suspense thrillers you will want her on your list too.

Alexandra includes, in the back of the book, why she included the political issues in her novel. She also shares that the series has been bought for TV. MAN ON MAN, where do I sign up? Criminal Minds, I would like you to meet Cara Lindstrom and Special Agent Matthew Roarke along with his elite team of investigators.

GREAT NEWS!  THE BOOKS ARE CURRENTLY ON SALE FOR THE FABULOUS PRICE OF $2.00 EACH OR YOU CAN GRAB THE 5 BOOK SERIES FOR AN AMAZING $9.00.

I also have a fabulous interview to share. Be sure and scroll through the post so you don’t miss anything!

Cover:  Ray Lundgren

Amazon  /  Audible  /  Goodreads

MY REVIEW

Hunger Moon is raw, powerful, blood pumping, and in your face.

I will start this review for Hunger Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff by saying that I took way to many notes and would spoil the book if I shared them all. I loved it so much, and I got so carried away because my emotions were running riot, that I feel like ranting and railing.

I love that we have action from the opening pages and I would recommend passing by the girl with the dark hair and backpack, if your intentions are evil.

Cara Lindstrom is the only survivor of her family’s brutal massacre. That is when she met IT, EVIL. Her stints in foster homes and group homes, brought her to where she is today, a vigilante serial killer, defender of women and children unable to defend themselves.

She is a force to be reckoned with. She is deadly. But right now, she is quiet, listening, waiting to be told what to do next. She will need to lay low, but where. Her face is everywhere and it is not just the law that is after her. Every pervert within internet range will have heard of the reward by now. Indian reservations have been a haven to her before and a belief there is more out there than meets the eye is a big part in her life.

It is February, the month of the Hunger Moon, and Special Agent Matthew Roarke is still haunted by Cara. They have a special connection, and whether he admits it or not, he is in love with this vigilante serial killer. Since the Bitter Moon, he has found his mission, combating the sexual abuse and trafficking of women and children. One of Roarke’s agents, Epps is black, so he can relate when it comes to being a target of hatred. Another agent, Singh, handles their internet searches and she will find a target on her back too. She is a citizen of the US, but will that make a difference now that she has been brought to IT’s attention?

Alexandra Sokoloff’s MOON series is not for the faint of heart. I love vigilantes and serial killers, especially female ones, with a righteous cause. She makes me eat up the pages, hoping that Cara doesn’t get caught or hurt, but I am afraid of what the future holds in store for her. How can there be a happy ending?

All over the country, universities are being targeted for Title IX violations. The people are fed up with the lily white one percenters protecting their own and covering up the brutal gang rapes of innocent young women. Who will stand up and speak for those who can’t?

Alexandra Sokoloff has incorporated today’s political climate of hate. In Hunger Moon, she shows how easily it is for those protecting their own to proclaim protesters as domestic terrorists. The book is so frightening, because I, too, feel a change in the United States that I never thought would happen. How can we possibly ignore it, even in a novel?

I rarely talk politics and I know most authors avoid it, but Alexandra Sokoloff makes her books so real because she does not avoid the ugliness and I revel in it. I love when my blood boils and I want to punch someone. So much of her writing strikes home for me and I feel the characters anger, frustration, fear and terror, making it impossible for them to move on. Damaged…oh yeah! I rage for revenge for them and we all know what happens when people are backed into a corner with nothing left to lose.

Alexandra brings the internet and Dark net up front and center. I don’t think there is one of us out there who hasn’t heard how dangerous it can be in the cyber world and care must be taken.

As everything comes together for the finale, the forces of good and evil and those walk the line, I feel like puking at the depravity of these ?men? and how far they will go for their own pleasure.

I was shocked that I was able to pick up Hunger Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff as an Amazon freebie. I never would have thought that was possible because her books are off the charts. Five stars is not nearly enough, but that’s all I have! And the TV series, I am on pins and needles just thinking about it. Criminal Minds you will have some competition. She is currently working on Book 6, which she has planned to be the end of the series, but with the TV show in the works, I am hoping we have more.

I MUST HAVE MORE…AND SOON.

I recommend beginning at the start of the series with Huntress Moon.

  5+++++ Stars

ALEXANDRA SOKOLOFF’S THOUGHTS

I am so excited to be sharing this intervew from Alexandra Sokoloff. Her burns have been burning my eyeballs for some time now and I just had to know where she came up with the idea and what drives her to write as she does, about the evil men do to those who are weaker and unable to defend themselves.

Why a female vigilante serial killer?

Before I sold my first screenplay, I worked in the Los Angeles County prison system, teaching juveniles, mostly teenage gang kids (boys), and very young girls who had been arrested for prostitution. Yes, the police arrested the girls instead of the men who were trafficking and abusing them. The whole experience taught me a lot about the vicious circle that the so-called justice system is, and the anger I feel about that injustice and the criminal procedure I learned during that period of my life have been simmering in the back of my head for a very long time. 

I’d also been wanting to do a book about a female serial killer for years. As a screenwriter I worked on several projects about serial killers (Hollywood is pretty obsessed with the subject!) and I think I’ve read everything the FBI has ever published on serial murder/sexual homicide. I was floored to find out, all those years ago, that there really aren’t female serial killers. I’ve interviewed many psychological profilers on this subject. Women kill, and sometimes they kill numbers of people, but arguably there has never been a woman who has committed what profilers call sexual homicide.

So that’s the issue I wanted to dig into.

And then all that came together into a real story idea when I went to Bouchercon, the crime writing conference, in San Francisco. There were two back-to-back discussions with several of my favorite crime authors: Val McDermid interviewing Denise Mina, then Robert Crais interviewing Lee Child. There was a lot of priceless stuff in those two hours, but two things that really struck me from the McDermid/Mina chat were Val saying that crime fiction is the best way to explore societal issues, and Denise saying that she finds powerful inspiration in writing about what makes her angry.

Write about what makes you angry? It doesn’t take me a millisecond’s thought to make my list. Child sexual abuse is the top, no contest. Violence against women and children. Discrimination of any kind. Religious intolerance. War crimes. Genocide. Torture. All the atrocities that somehow got left out of the Ten Commandments. That anger has fueled a lot of my books and scripts over the years.

And then right after the McDermid/Mina chat, there was Lee Child talking about Reacher, one of my favorite fictional characters, and it got me thinking about what it would look like if a woman were doing what Reacher was doing. (It would look a lot crazier, is what it would look like, because women aren’t traditionally predators – we’re prey.) And that was it—instantly I had the whole story of Huntress Moon and the series: a woman who was killing like a serial killer, but who was not exactly a serial killer, and the FBI agent hunting her who becomes more and more conflicted about catching her once he uncovers her background and motives.

I love strong females that create ambivalence. Is it right? Is it wrong? 

Yes, that’s exactly the kind of ambivalence I wanted to create in readers.

All this was before the #MeToo and #TimesUp movement exploded into world consciousness, and I’m so glad that finally, FINALLY, a critical mass of women and men are angry enough to confront all these issues head on, in a way that I am passionately hoping will lead to lasting change in rape culture.

Of course killing is wrong. But the way that the legal and criminal justice system handles rape is also wrong. My producers and I start the pilot of the Huntress TV series with the main title quote from the original The Fugitive:  

But laws are made by men, carried out by men, and men are imperfect.

Was there something that triggered the idea for Cara, specifically?

Many, many years ago I was gripped by the real-life case of a little girl in California who survived an encounter with a serial killer. She was just nine years old and had spent the night at the house of a friend of hers, the same age. No one knew that this friend was being stalked by a serial rapist, who broke into the house that night, cut the throat of the visiting girl, and then raped and murdered her friend while the wounded girl lay dying.

But – that little girl didn’t die.

I have always thought that the little girl who survived that horrific encounter was in a room with pure evil. Add to that the fact that she was literally dying, probably having an out-of-body experience. So it haunts me. What did she see? How did she experience that? Can you ever be the same again after witnessing such an atrocity? Or would you maybe always be able to recognize evil when you see it?

And once I had the seed of that character, who takes her own path to fight evil by any means necessary, I wanted to create her other half: a male law enforcement agent who is committed to fighting evil within the bounds of the law. What would a hero like that look like? How might they even start working together, while never being able to BE together? So that became Special Agent Matthew Roarke.

What kind of research do you do into the abuse and trafficking of women and children?  

As I said above, I was living with the real-life survivors and consequences of sexual abuse and trafficking when I worked in the LA juvenile court system. But really I think my research into this started when I was just a child – because ever since I can remember I’ve been in despair that no one seems to make the eradication of the sexual abuse of children a number one priority. How could there be anything more important than stopping that atrocity?

And yet do we hear politicians even mention this issue?

Well, I’ll tell you who does make it a priority – California Senator Kamala Harris. When she was the California Attorney General (and before that, San Francisco District Attorney) she changed laws in this state to impose sentences on child traffickers that make it much less lucrative for gangs to sell children and teenage girls. When I do legal research for the books I am constantly running into examples of the legal and political work that Harris has done on this issue. She gets it. She has the legal experience and moral conviction to stop the atrocity. She’s a warrior on the subject. That’s what we need in our politicians. It’s why we need a LOT more women in politics.

I look forward to finding out what ultimately happens to Cara and Roarke. I would love for her…and Roarke, to have a happy ending, but I don’t see how that is possible. 

You are not alone in wanting these two to somehow have a happy ending! And you’re right that it’s not very realistic. But even so, I think you’ll be happy with my upcoming Book 6 of the series—which doesn’t exactly end things, but I believe it will be a satisfying conclusion to the books. At least for a while.

And I’m excited that the characters have a chance to live on, and go on to new adventures, in the TV series.

GOODREADS BLURB

Revenge has no limits.

Special Agent Matthew Roarke has abandoned his rogue search for serial killer Cara Lindstrom. He’s returned to the FBI to head a task force with one mission: to rid society of its worst predators. But as the skeletal symbols of Santa Muerte, “Lady Death,” mysteriously appear at universities nationwide, threatening death to rapists, Roarke’s team is pressured to investigate. When a frat boy goes missing in Santa Barbara, Roarke realizes a bloodbath is coming—desperate teenagers are about to mete out personal, cold-blooded justice.

Hiding from the law, avenging angel Cara Lindstrom is on her own ruthless quest. She plans to stay as far away from Roarke as possible—until an old enemy comes after both her and the FBI, forcing her back into Roarke’s orbit. This time, the huntress has become the hunted . .

ABOUT ALEXANDRA SOKOLOFF

I’m the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker and Anthony Award-nominated author of the Amazon bestselling crime and supernatural thrillers The Harrowing, The Price, Book of Shadows, The Unseen, The Space Between, and the new Thriller Award- nominated Huntress/FBI thriller series: Huntress Moon, Blood Moon, Cold Moon. Bitter Moon, Hunger Moon. The New York Times Book Review has called me “a daughter of Mary Shelley” and my novels “some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre.”

I’m a California native and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, where I majored in theater and minored in everything that Berkeley has a reputation for. After college I moved to Los Angeles, where I’ve made an interesting living doing novel adaptations and selling original thriller scripts to various Hollywood studios.

In my stories I like to cross the possibility of the supernatural with very real life explanations for any strangeness going on, and base the action squarely in fact. THE UNSEEN is based on real paranormal research conducted at the Duke University parapsychology lab, and BOOK OF SHADOWS teams a Boston homicide detective and a practicing Salem witch in a race to solve what may be a Satanic killing. THE SPACE BETWEEN, is an edgy supernatural YA about a troubled high school girl who is having dreams of a terrible massacre at her school, and becomes convinced that she can prevent the shooting if she can unravel the dream.

I also have written paranormal romance (THE SHIFTERS, KEEPER OF THE SHADOWS) and the non-fiction workbooks SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS and WRITING LOVE, based on my internationally acclaimed workshops and blog (http://screenwritingtricks.com)

I live in Los Angeles and in Scotland, with Scottish crime author Craig Robertson.

When I’m not writing I dance: jazz, ballet, salsa, Lindy, swing – I do it all, every chance I get.

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MY REVIEW LINKS FOR ALEXANDRA SOKOLOF

• Huntress Moon
• Blood Moon
• Cold Moon
• Bitter Moon

I love these gorgeous covers.

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