Review: Blood Moon by John David Bethel

Blood Moon by John David Bethel
Publisher: Tell-Tale Publishing Group
Release Date: December 4, 2016
Book Format: Paperback
# of Pages: 438
Synopsis: On a hot, steamy afternoon in Miami, Cuban-American businessman Recidio Suarez is brutally beaten and abducted. Handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded, he has no idea why he has been targeted. What he discovers is heart-stopping. What he endures during almost a month of captivity compares only to the most horrendous stories of prisoners of war. He is tortured, and under the threat of death, and worse - the rape of his wife and torture of his children - Suarez is forced to hand over his multi-million dollar holdings to his captors. Suarez survives and then spends the next few months staying one step ahead of the murderous pack. During this time, he and his lawyer, Nolan Stevens - a former Special Agent in Charge of the Miami Office of the FBI - are having difficulties convincing the Miami-Dade Police Department that a crime has been committed. Their efforts are complicated by Steven's difficult history with the head of the MDPD Special Investigations Division, who is not interested in pursuing the case.

My Review:

I received Blood Moon by John David Bethel for review and these are my honest thoughts.

Blood Moon is a novel based on a true story of innocent Recidio Suarez who finds himself in the hands of some dangerous men for what seemed like longer, but only for one month. These men blindfold him with duct tape and torture him until getting the information they need to inherit his billions of dollars. If only the police believed this story, maybe they could have saved the others…

Before receiving this novel, I had totally forgotten it was based on a true story. Upon arrival on my door stop I became that much more excited to devour this, it being something that actually happened. As a reviewer I like to read everything, especially real stories to stay up to date on what is happening in today's world.

Bethel did a great job describing the torture, and death. At all of the appropriate times there was cringing and shock in many of my facial expressions. There were even a few points during the book where laughter was necessary. Laughing while reading something that was all true may seem rude, but it just shows that the author knows what he’s doing in terms of writing. A writer wants to be able to pull out of their readers as many emotions as possible and Bethel really did that with this one.

An interesting aspect of this novel is that there were more than one story. After learning what happened to Suarez our original main character the author moves into the stories of another man and his girlfriend, and we learn what happens to them at the hands of this very same group of men.

I also loved that the scenes in the book that were not dealing with Suarez and his torture or the other victims were also good enough to hold my interest. Often when I read true crime novels some of the technical stuff or investigation can get boring to me, but here that did not happen at all which I was pleased with.

The only thing I would change about this book was the usage of Spanish phrases. I have read books in which use spanish phrasing before, but either they only use it once or twice throughout the whole book or the phrase is translated almost immediately. Here, there were a few times in which the spanish was translated, but there were also times where it wasn’t and I was so eager to know what they were saying, and ended up being disappointed when I had no idea.

Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good thriller as well as those who enjoy true crime. The book being true and full of suspense was what kept me turning the pages constantly.