Audiobook Review: A Different Dawn by Isabella Maldonado

A Different Dawn
Author: Isabella Maldonado
Narrator: Roxanne Hernandez
Series: Nina Guerrera (Book 2)
Publication: Brilliance Audio (August 10, 2021)
Length: 10 hours and 47 minutes

Description: For nearly thirty years a serial killer has been hiding in plain sight. So has the key to an FBI agent’s dark past.

A family is murdered as they sleep. FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera and her new team are tasked with determining whether there is any link between this attack and another triple homicide from four years earlier and more than two thousand miles away. In the process, they’ll discover a serial killer so cunning that his grisly trail of death spanning nearly three decades has gone undetected. Each crime scene reminds Nina of the ghostly Latin folktale of La Llorona, which terrified her when she was an abandoned and vulnerable child. Now it’s back to haunt her.

Nina has known evil, but these macabre reenactments are as disturbing as they are baffling. Now she must uncover the meaning behind the rituals as the evidence leads her in an unexpected direction—far closer to home than anyone could have imagined. As the team narrows in on a suspect, the present collides with Nina’s past in a twist of fate that forces her to make the ultimate sacrifice.

My Thoughts: This is the second in the Nina Guerrera series. This time Nina is integrating with her new team of FBI agents as they look into the murder of a young family which has ties to a similar murder four years earlier. 

The team discovers that this is only one of eight different murders of young families that have occurred on leap day. As they try to find connections between all the various murders - some of which had been classified and murder-suicides - Nina begins to find a connection to her own life. 

She was found abandoned in a trashcan when she was an infant and was raised in the foster care system. She had always wondered about her past and this story answers her questions.

The narrator did an excellent job with the variety of characters and accents in the story. She also did a good job with the pacing. 

My only complaint has to do with the coincidence that brought Nina's past into the story. Otherwise, I enjoyed the story which was fast-paced and interesting.

I bought this one. You can buy your copy here.