Review: Edge Of Light by Cythia Justlin.

While this book is considered suspense romance it caught my interest because the story was down to earth, harsh, embedded with brutality and violence that really overpowered the romance. The plot itself is one that is extreme yet a real part of today’s world. I thought it was well written and somewhat of a thriller. The author also mixed in a treasure hunt of horror. The setting was in the jungles of Cambodia. This is a story with plenty of surprise, tension and overwhelming danger. The two main characters, Josie and Oliver were well developed and so were the villains.

Jocelyn Hewitt, an anthropologist, is part of a government team who excavates human remains so they can be returned home to the loved ones after combat. This mission to Cambodia Josie wasn’t supposed to go on because it was her father’s remains and other fallen men they were seeking. With determination she employed her way secretly with the team without permission or their knowledge of her intent because she was suppose to be on vacation elsewhere.

Oliver is a CIA agent who has been captive in Cambodia for two years. He was tortured and beaten, but the worst cruel act, he was made to watch his fellow agents slowly die. He also was at death’s door until the Trinity (the leader and his two brothers of the horror of violence in the area) found out he was an artist. The Trinity used Oliver’s paintings as his catharsis (spiritual release) for the horrid things he did to the people in the villages around him. So, the only reason Oliver was alive was because he was surviving as a broken man with no hope left until he hears a woman sobbing in the cell next to him….

Josie and Oliver were cellmates with a wall of plaster and wire between them. Josie had also just seen her teammates killed and they threw her in a cell with no explanation why she was still alive. This is how Josie and Oliver had come to know each other.

Josie didn’t know this was all planned out before she even left the States to go to Cambodia. The Trinity had his reasons for kidnapping her. He thought she knew where the treasure of red diamonds was hidden. Her father’s plane crashed in Cambodia years ago and before he died he scribbled in a log book and drew a map of symbols that the Trinity could not decipher. Josie was only eight years old at that time but the Trinity, who was inching his way to insanity, thought she new of the location of the diamonds hidden in Cambodia.

The story intensifies with scenes of trying to escape, being whipped with bamboo strips, and days of torture to no end. Even children from the age of seven to seventeen were stolen from their families to work in the mines that belonged to the Trinity. The story was touching and Josie and Oliver throughout the story did finally make a connection through survival……
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