When Revenge Calls: Book One of the Vengeance Trilogy

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Sebastian Clarke

Sandra L. Barone spent years writing heartfelt columns about family, love, loss, and resilience for the Pascack Press, and every one of those years was preparation for this. When Revenge Calls takes everything she knows about the emotional interior of human beings and puts it inside a psychological thriller that grabs you from the first page and genuinely doesn't let go.

Samantha is the kind of protagonist you root for immediately and completely. She has already done the hard thing. She escaped a brutal marriage. She buried the painful secrets of her childhood. She found Doc, steady and compassionate and exactly the kind of person you want in your corner when you are finally, carefully, learning to trust again. And then the past comes back anyway, the way it always does in the best thrillers, not with a warning but with a chill that starts small and keeps growing.

What makes the cat-and-mouse dynamic in this book work so effectively is the layering. The threat Samantha faces in her present turns out to be connected to the trauma she worked so hard to leave in her past, and as those connections surface one by one, both she and the reader are forced to reckon with the same uncomfortable truth: forgetting is not the same as healing, and someone has been keeping score all along.

Barone writes about trauma and survival with the honesty of someone who understands both from the inside. The emotional grit that early reviewers keep reaching for as a description is real and it is present throughout. This is not a thriller that uses a protagonist's pain as set dressing. The pain is the story, and the fight to reclaim her life in spite of it is what makes Samantha's journey genuinely compelling rather than just suspenseful.

For fans of psychological thrillers with real emotional depth underneath the tension, this is a debut that announces a writer absolutely worth following through the rest of the trilogy.

About the Author

Sandra L. Barone

Sandra L. Barone is a writer, storyteller, and community leader whose work blends honesty, humor, and heart. A moderator for The Mom Link, Sandra supports a global community of women, men, and families seeking prayers, healing, and connection after loss. Through this work, she has been invited to share her experiences on podcasts that explore grief, resilience, and the power of community.

Her writing career spans multiple genres, from deeply emotional non-fiction to fiction that explores the complexities of the human spirit. For years, Sandra penned a beloved weekly column in the Pascack Press Newspaper titled I Just Need to Breathe, where she invited readers into the joys and challenges of family life with four children and an extended family full of colorful personalities. Her columns—equal parts lighthearted and profound—resonated with readers who found comfort and connection in her stories. The final column, written after the passing of her son Drew, offered a heartfelt closing to the series while honoring the enduring bonds of family and love.

In addition to her columns, Sandra is working on a domestic thriller trilogy. When Revenge Calls is the first book in the series. Through every story, whether drawn from her own life or crafted from imagination, she writes with a deep commitment to honesty, vulnerability, and the shared human experience.