The Apartment
Kevin Bachar
Independently published (December 20, 2024)
Reviewed by Carson Buckingham
In The Apartment, we meet the main character, Kat, as a child whose father is a degenerate gambler. She helps him cheat at the local casino blackjack table with the psychic ability she has, but the father doesn’t know when to quit and is badly beaten and they are both ejected. He is so injured that he crashes their car. He is killed and Kat loses her spleen, making her risk of infection so high that she rarely leaves her house.
Years pass. She is in her late 20s and now has a boyfriend, Benjamin, who is an aspiring actor. When he gets a part on Broadway, he talks her into moving to New York with him.
But they don’t live in the city.
They have an apartment on Roosevelt Island—a place that used to be called Blackwell’s Island and housed a huge lunatic asylum. And even though it was closed down in 1901, the area is still pretty creepy—especially if you have psychic ability. But is it sparsely populated, which means less risk of infection for Kat.
Not long after they settle in, the murders start. At each crime scene, the killer removes some part of the body and writes “The Harvester” in the victim’s blood on the nearest wall.
Will Kat be next?
For me, this book was a real page-turner, and I finished it in one sitting. I had parts of it figured out, but not the whole thing. You can tell that the author is also a screenwriter because the pacing is flawless and keeps the story moving right along.
That being said, this book could have benefitted from a proofreader, with all the typos, misused words, grammatical errors, missing words, and style errors sprinkled throughout. It was such a good book, but these errors brought it down…such a shame, because the author really knows how to write a terrific story.
4 out of 5 stars. If it had been proofread, I’d have given it 5 stars. Give it a try, though—you won’t be sorry.
