In 2014, Elle Klass published Eye of the Storm: Eilida's Tragedy, the first novel in her Ruthless Storm Trilogy of psychological paranormal thrillers. The story follows two seemingly unconnected women: one lying in a coma in the hospital after witnessing a vicious crime, and the other a receptionist who becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to the first. In chapters that alternate between the perspectives of the two women and some coming from a third-person narrator able to fill in the gaps in the women’s stories, the novel builds to a surprising twist before ending on a <a href="http://www.supersummary.com/cliffhanger/">cliffhanger</a>. Eilida is a young woman who lives in a cabin in a rural area. She is brave in the face of the animals that wander around her property but has an overwhelming fear of storms. One night, as a storm is approaching, Eilida is about to go to town to meet friends for pizza when she hears her neighbors fighting and throwing things in their house. As the storm gets closer, she hears screams and whimpers and decides to investigate. However, when she enters the house, she is horrified to find the gruesome aftermath of a horrific murder. Doing her best to hide, she runs, but the deranged killer gets a look at her face. As the terrain becomes slick with mud, she accidentally smashes into a tree which knocks her into a shallow river. She hits her head on a huge boulder when she falls. An unconscious Eilida is found and taken to the hospital in the nearby town of Lyden. Although alive, she comes out of her short-term coma with amnesia, desperately trying to remember what has happened to her. The second narrator is Sunshine, a young receptionist at the Lyden Times newspaper. Sunshine is true to her name both in her personality and in her neat and orderly life of performing her job duties well and spending quality time with her loving and respectful fiancé Jerry. One day, she sees a headline about the mysterious coma patient in the hospital, and something about it just grabs her attention. Although she has never before investigated a story, Sunshine decides to learn everything she can about the young woman and maybe figure out what has happened to her. Luckily, Eilida was found with her identification, so Sunshine learns her name and from there traces her address despite not being able to visit Eilida in her hospital room. However, when Sunshine goes to the rural village where Eilida lived, the visit turns her understanding of the world and of herself upside down. Everywhere she goes, people mistake her for Eilida – it would appear that Sunshine looks exactly like her, except with different color hair. The more time she spends investigating Eilida, the more Sunshine feels her own personality fading and the other woman’s taking over. She trades in her smart skirts and heels for jeans and sneakers and even starts cheating on her fiancé with Eilida’s boyfriend, Jay. Kass gives readers a few steamy sex scenes while exploring this relationship. More disturbingly, Sunshine starts seeing things that aren’t there – particularly, memories that seem to be about Eilida’s childhood, and also terrifying visions of a man with coal-dark eyes stalking her that appear every time the weather turns at all cloudy. Sunshine has no idea how to interpret what is happening. Are she and Eilida related to each other, or even possibly twins? Is one of them haunting or possessing the other? How is it possible for two women who don’t know each other to share mental imagery? Is she simply losing her mind? In order to figure out what is causing her delusions and hallucinations, Sunshine reads up on parapsychology and hypnosis and even goes so far as to visit Dr. Weered, a hypnotist. Still, nothing seems to be helping, as Sunshine suffers from memory loss about her own life – and the simultaneous gaining of memories that seems to be coming from Eilida’s life. Finally, the truth is revealed: there is no Sunshine and there never was. In her attempt both to repress her memories of the horrible murder scene she saw, and her terror at being found by the murderer, Eilida created a wholly fictional personality to “investigate” her memories. Everything that Sunshine experiences is actually Eilida’s brain trying to find the underlying cause of what has happened through trauma. When she pieces together what is going on, Eilida recovers from her amnesia, and the Sunshine alter ego receded. Now Eilida knows who the mysterious man is that had been haunting “Sunshine” – it is the face of Evan O’Connor, a psychopath whose unstoppable killing continues even to this day. Eilida realizes that he may even now be targeting her; the novel ends on a cliffhanger, to be picked up in the sequel, Before the Storm: Evan’s Sins.

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Elle Klass

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