Nikki Stern

Pickett County Sheriff Samantha (Sam) Tate must hunt down a serial killer who's taken up residence in her jurisdiction, killing a young brunette each spring and dressing her like a bride. Sam must cope with recurring nightmares about a wedding massacre she witnessed as a child and her feelings about Special Agent Terry Sloan, her partner on the case. Can she stop more murders without losing her cool, her heart, or her life?

A Sam Tate Mystery

The Wedding Crasher

Laura Carminati

The Wedding Crasher begins immediately with the discovery of the body, a woman is found under a white oak, with a fairly dated wedding dress. Sheriff Samantha Tate knows that the “wedding crasher” is back. He didn’t make many casualties, “only” five, in Florida, in Georgia and then in Tennessee, but this is the second murder in the area and Samantha wants to solve the case.

With Samantha, Special agent Terry Sloan investigates, out of Tampa FBI that during the first investigation seems to have approached the new sheriff a little too much only then to return to Florida when the case became cold. Will they be able to solve it together? And what is hiding in Samantha’s past?


Wow! I must say that Samantha’s past intrigues me a lot. The book starts a little slow even though we are at the crime scene right away and I liked it a lot. The fact of starting immediately as if to say “let’s get right to the facts and let’s not get lost in useless things” (thank you very much, lately I am reading books that are too long on facts that have nothing to do with the story just to write more pages) I really like it.

The chapters are short which is a plus and after a third of the book the facts follow one another with a speed that I like and so I started to appreciate it more (meaning that I didn’t want to stop reading to understand how it ended, which didn’t occurre at the beginning).

I really like the author’s style, as I said, it presents short chapters that you can read quickly, so it makes you want to read more (in my opinion, of course) and I like that the book is divided in four seasons even if, at first, I didn’t understand why, well, I still don’t understand it because there is just one page with only the name of the season on it, but I do understand why the story lasts a year.

The killer surprised me and I have to say that the last chapters, from his discovery to his capture, I read them all in one breath and it is the speed that I like.

At the beginning of this review I had two questions but right now I only remember one… (Laura why you never write down what you think??), but I probably can’t give an answer because I was distracted… It seems to me that the killer missed a year of killing, but I can’t find an answer in the book about why. Now, I don’t know if I invented it myself, if I don’t remember it correctly or if it’s really so, but I can’t find an answer. Does anyone remember?

I also like that the book takes place in Tennessee because it is a state in which I never went with my readings, which will change in the next book (at least from what was said in this), but it doesn’t matter. At least I visited this place once.

As I said I like the mystery about the shooting in which Samantha was a victim, I like that Terry is interested and I like that they are going to start a journey together and therefore I really hope to find both in the next book that I will surely read.

Thanks Partners In Crime and Nikki Stern for my book copy.

Book excerpt and giveawey here: https://eiencafe.com/the-wedding-cras...

The Wedding Crasher A Sam Tate Mystery

Reviews