It’s Romance Saturday here at Shiny Book Review! And as it also happens to be Valentine’s Day, what could be better than Aaron Paul Lazar’s suspenseful romance DEVIL’S LAKE?

I’ve deliberately held Lazar’s romance for Valentine’s Day precisely because it’s the best romantic suspense novel I’ve read in quite some time. Twenty-something Portia Lamont was abducted two years ago, and has finally broken free from her terrible captivity. Beaten, nearly broken, and dangerously thin, she gets in her captor’s truck and makes her way home to her parents’ Vermont horse farm.

Once there, she runs into Boone Hawke, a kind man she’s known since childhood, who’s been running her parents’ farm due to her mother’s cancer treatment in far-away New York City. As Portia can barely stand the sight of any man due to the nature of her captivity (let’s just say she was assaulted multiple times, sexually and…