“Don’t hate me ’cause I’m interesting.”

Squatch Watch by J.A.C. Beardmore

Why This Rating?

I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review

Beware the cryptids have made an appearance! But THUMB is doing what they do best – keeping order to all the chaos no matter the Nightmare client.

This was a fantastic book in the THUMBverse series. Beardmore takes us to the Appalachian mountains and we are on the hunt for a Nightmare that has a havoc permit and is.. well.. causing havoc with the human public. It’s time to find Bigfoot – Or rather – Sasquatch! (sorry Eric, forgot that B.F. is rude) We get a chance to reconnect with Special Agent Sarah once again in this adventure and she is just as fun as the first time we got to meet her. Her sass is still very much there and I just fell even more into her as a character. Eric was a fun side character! He kept up very nicely with Sarah in personality and jabs back while staying entirely his own person. Even as they were undercover as the TV producer and cameraman, this duo was a fun pair to read. I also really enjoyed the Squatch Watch team that Sarah had to pair with to find her Nightmare. Amos and his crew were absolutely Appalachian Mountain folks all the way through and I LOVED it! The personalities, manners, even the various accents scattered amongst the group were a big yes! Jethro cracked me up. It also help that they simply want to find Sasquatches, say hi, quick wave, and go on with their day. It made it adorable to watch them function while they were on the hunt.

Favorite character of mine – Millville. Don’t know why other than his quirky nature with all things trash, his manners, and his speech. But it also might be the true Nightmare of him that is coming through the writing and giving me shivers. (Snallygaster?)

I really enjoyed Beardmore’s writing in the first book and he absolutely delivered his best in this one too. It is a story full of fast wit and good descriptions to pull you into the world. I always wanted to know the crazy things that the entire team would run into next. Plus, the twist we run into? I didn’t see it coming which made it even better, brilliant! I did sort of forget in the middle what we were actually doing out in the wilds. Not sure if it was because I was enjoying following the group or because maybe Sarah was getting hooked into the Squatch Watch stuff, but remember – Havoc Permit Acquirement is the objective. The author steered me back here and there when I really started to pull out of the world, so the distraction doesn’t stay too long. Beardmore also brought back his signature side stories to break up the chapters (which are mostly to help pass time during the main story while our characters are sleeping, traveling, etc..). Loved seeing what new group of people got caught up in the investigation by accident!

Don’t worry if you have never read book 1, other than everyone staying quite about “the incident” that happened in the first book (essentially the plot of book 1), the author does a wonderful job at reminding us and adding plenty of context clues to tell us what happened. I definitely had “oh yea!” moments as I was reading and was very grateful that there were those little touch back moments to the first one.

I have my review on the first one up if anyone wants to read it What Fresh Hell is This?.

A big recommendation to read this one! We are just getting our toes dipped into the world of all things Nightmares. You might get an itch to start looking at cryptozoology information and the various creatures that we run across after reading this one though – personal experience there. The amount of lore that is out there is insane and was a lot of fun to read. Fun Fact: if you visit Georgia and are up in the mountains, you should go find the Bigfoot Museum we’ve got up there. It is a cool place! This entire series has been fun to follow from the horror theme in the first now to cryptids, the protection THUMB has is never ending. I’m excited to see what else Special Agent Sarah gets assigned next time.

Time to get lost in the next story!