Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

The Street Between the Pines by J.J. Alo revolves around the overworked Curtis Reynolds, who is called back home due to a hurricane approaching his Connecticut riverfront house. Reynolds has a lot on his plate between a home life that is deteriorating and the possibility of losing the house, not by the hurricane, but by the force of the government. Then there's the trauma sustained in both war and on the streets, the latter of which is the result of a fatal accident, having fallen asleep at the wheel. His return to the neighborhood is equally nightmarish, finding it devastated by the storm. Worse still, the thing in his basement isn't just one of the many unfettered felines meandering around, and the formerly alive but now dead or on life-support residents of his neighborhood do not appear to have succumbed to natural causes.

“Across the hallway, he leaned against the corner station. Fighting the urge to panic, he wondered if this could be it...” J.J. Alo does an exceptional job of giving readers a gut punch early on in The Street Between the Pines, ratcheting up the mystery with the discovery of a mutilated body and much more within the first couple of chapters. The suspense from here never lets up and the realism of Curtis' rather sad life is the undercurrent to a foreboding that is far more sinister. This is, after all, a horror story, although a plate of his wife's 'one-pot slop' is a terror of its own. That said, Amy is better than Curtis deserves and between the two she is the more likable character. Their backstory is fully fleshed out and, with a ton of history, there is a true sense that we know them and where they started, inside and out, from Alo's depictions. The psychological elements are perfectly done and Alo's writing is crisp, clean, and utterly engrossing—and now I know to keep away from women in Hello Kitty shirts and carts full of ice cream. Very highly recommended.