Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Dark Romance

Available On: Amazon (though I highly recommend the Audiobooks)

Before you go any further, this is not a spoiler-free review. It’s an unapologetic dissection of the second book in S.T. Abby’s Mindfuck series, and if you’ve not already read my musings on book one, you should probably start there. If you want a spoiler-free look at the series, you’ll find it here (mostly, it’s not completely spoiler-free, but it’s considerably more restrained than this is about to be).

Are we all in the right place? 

Excellent. Because I have a lot of thoughts on Sidetracked, and on the series in general. And it starts (weirdly) with how well book-ended it is. The Risk ends with Hadley ambushing Lana at her house and confronting her about Kennedy Carlyle. Sidetracked picks up at exactly that point. The whole book is then spent as Lana tries to correct for Hadley. 

Then correct for everything that happens because she corrected for Hadley.

Until she finds herself back home, once again, and is ambushed by the Boogeyman.

It was at this point (on my first reading) that I realised, Oh shit. I’m not stopping until all five books are done.

And I didn’t. I read them back-to-back. Then reread them. Honestly the hardest part of writing these reviews has been reminding myself exactly what happens in each. But while Sidetracked continues the larger story of the Mindfuck series seamlessly, it also has a very specific job.

This is Hadley’s book.

She grew increasingly suspicious of Lana through book one, and that trajectory continues in book two. And while she’s not a POV character, and we are still fully immersed in the Lana/Logan dual POV deliciousness, this is the book where Hadley stops being the FBI hacker who doesn’t particularly like Logan’s new girlfriend and becomes. 

Sidetracked makes Hadley a character with her own history, her own trauma, and sets up the continuation of her arc and relationship with Lana for the rest of the series.

The Competence Of Women And Why Hadley’s Right About Lana

Hadley is an antagonist in the opening books of the series. From the second she meets Lana, she has this gut feeling there’s something off about her.

And, obviously, she’s right.

Lana is lying to them.

Lana is a highly competent serial killer hell-bent on revenge. (We love her for it, but the fact remains there is definitely something off about Lana.)

So when Hadley turns up at Lana’s house at the end of The Risk and confronts Lana about Kennedy Carlyle, it felt inevitable.

But Lana doesn’t blink.

She prepped for the moment somebody connected ‘Lana’ to Kennedy Carlyle. She has the answers. She knows the script. Lana can lift her shirt, show Hadley her scars, and be confident that they match the injuries Kennedy suffered well enough it’s believable. It’s visceral. Hadley can’t possibly think Lana faked that kind of injury. 

The explanation given to Hadley is convincing, because it was planned. Because literally everything Lana and Jake do has been planned to the nth degree. 

Not that they planned specifically for Hadley to rock up at her door asking the question. But when she does, Lana is in no way fazed. And that’s a whole new level to Lana’s competence. There’s a difference between forensic countermeasures, physically overcoming an opponent who is considerably larger and stronger than you are, having the strategic insight to think everything through, and what this is.

Being able to remain calm and collected in the face of somebody calling you out on the one thing you cannot let anybody figure out.

Lana can stand there and lie to Hadley’s face, not blink, and perfectly recall every detail of her cover story.

That tells you a lot about Lana.

But the fact Hadley put the pieces together at all also tells you how good Hadley is.

She isn’t a profiler. She’s the hacker.

Yet in Logan’s world and a room full of profilers, Hadley’s the one who realises something about Lana doesn’t add up.

I find that hilarious.

Logan has deliberately developed his ability to read people. He has trained it and honed it because that is literally his job.

Hadley just has it.

And I love that about her.

Ferguson Makes Lana’s Moral Code Bigger Than Lana

Once Hadley presents herself as a problem, it’s obvious something needs to be done about her. On digging into Hadley’s past, Jake discovers Ferguson, the man who abused Hadley and countless other children. The man who has escaped any kind of justice for his crimes and may well still be carrying them out.

One might expect a serial killer faced with a person about to discover her secret to…well, unalive the problem. But Lana doesn’t go after Hadley.

She goes after Ferguson.

And that is the most Lana thing she could have done. If she hadn’t done it, I don’t think she’d be the same character. And she’d be worse for the change. Once Lana knows what this man did, there’s no way Lana can simply shrug it off as not her problem. Because, no, he didn’t do it to her. 

But that doesn’t matter.

Lana’s whole worldview is built around holding people accountable for their actions when nobody else will. Sidetracked is where we see that those rules don’t only apply to the men who hurt her.

Ferguson didn’t. She’d never even heard of him before.

It doesn’t matter.

He still did those things.

The same rule applies to Ferguson as to everybody else Lana is targeting.

And the bigger point is that Lana could probably have got rid of Hadley as a problem without launching a whole new little vendetta against Ferguson.

But it never occurs to Lana to hurt Hadley.

Or threaten Hadley.

Or do anything to Hadley.

Instead, Lana does the one thing that, from her own understanding of how these things work, might actually help her. Which, bizarrely, is a level of emotional intelligence most people don’t manage, let alone the supposedly stone-cold serial killer.

Lana’s actions have a knock-on effect. They force Hadley to confront the fact that what happened to her was real. She wasn’t imagining things. She wasn’t mad. She tried to speak and nobody believed her.

Now she has to confront not only what happened to her, but how many other people Ferguson hurt as well. That gives Hadley an arc that completes inside this book, satisfyingly, while feeding the longer-running arc of her suspicion of Lana that threads through the whole series. Because, by the end of Sidetracked, despite Lana’s very convincing explanation, Hadley’s suspicions are still very much alive.

Unlike Ferguson.

Laurel Proves Lana Isn’t Just About Revenge

The feminine rage and revenge arc of Mindfuck is, quite literally, the whole point. I occasionally see people bleating about this on TikTok and I’m like, “But, sir, that’s what we came for.” And yes, as much as the dark romance crowd (and even the normies, tbh) love a good revenge plot, the best of them have more going on than straightforward vengeance.

Laurel is Mindfuck’s answer to how single-minded Lana is in her quest. 

Because when she tracks down Ferguson and discovers a young, terrified girl, traumatised, alone, with no home to go to, Lana chooses to save her. 

And saving Laurel isn’t about vengeance at all.

It’s just the right thing to do.

Lana sees a terrified, traumatised girl and takes her somewhere safe.

That’s it.

Despite Laurel being potentially even more dangerous to Lana than Hadley, she still chooses to save her. Hadley suspects things. Laurel has actually seen things. She knows where Lana was, and what happened. If she chose to, Laurel could tell everybody.

Lana is incredibly careful about everything she does. She has forensic countermeasures. She has a clear plan. She thinks everything through.

And then she finds Laurel and doesn’t really stop to think at all.

A girl needs help, so Lana helps her.

She doesn’t try to manage Laurel as a threat. She essentially accepts the fact that if this little girl decides to give her up, then that is the end of it. And she’s okay with that. Because making sure Laurel is safe matters more. Lana’s morality is tough to dismiss after this as simply being about personal revenge.

Lana Has Rules And They Apply To Her Too

If you look at how Lana actually exacts her revenge, she is incredibly specific. Some men lose all their fingers. Some don’t. What she does to them is connected to what they, specifically, did to her and her brother.

Lana doesn’t kill everybody the same way because they all fall into one convenient category marked BAD MEN. She holds them accountable for their individual actions. She has a strict sense of what is right, what is just, what is acceptable, what is justifiable, what is wrong, and what should be punished.

And she has to hold herself to that same standard.

At her heart, Lana is an absolutely shattered girl. She glued herself back together through sheer force of will, and by constructing this incredibly clear understanding of what was done, who did it, and what justice looks like when nobody else is willing to provide it.

For her to know what Ferguson had done and simply ignore it would break that.

For her to leave Laurel behind because helping her was inconvenient would break it.

Lana couldn’t not go after Ferguson. And she couldn’t not save Laurel. 

Not without breaking herself.

Sidetracked Is Exactly What This Book Is

Of all the titles in the series, Sidetracked might be the most on the nose. But there are layers to what that actually means. Everybody in this book is sidetracked from the thing they’re supposed to be doing.

Lana is sidetracked by Hadley.

Then Ferguson.

Then Laurel.

She’s sidetracked by Logan, and the fact she’s falling in love.

More than anything, though, she’s sidetracked by suddenly having to re-enter the world.

Lana has kept herself apart from everybody and everything in it for years. Everybody who knew Victoria Evans believes she died. Jake is the one connection she still has. Then Logan turns up. Hadley becomes a pain in her arse. That leads to Ferguson. Ferguson leads to Laurel.

And Laurel leads Lana back to somebody from her old life who thought she was dead.

She reconnects.

At this point, Lana doesn’t understand what is happening to her. I think she’s afraid Logan might eventually give her something to live for. But she hasn’t realised that’s already happening. She thinks she’s being sidetracked from her mission.

What she is actually doing is slowly reconnecting herself to the world she already decided she was going to leave.

Logan Keeps Getting Lana Wrong

Logan knows Lana is unusual. He knew that almost immediately. From their earliest conversations, he can see that she is contradictory. He profiles her one way, then she says or does something that doesn’t fit, and he has to reconsider what he thought he knew.

He understands she’s intelligent. Different.

He sees this phenomenal woman who can understand his job, accepts the demands it puts on him, and doesn’t constantly require him to be less obsessed with what he does. To Logan, Lana almost seems too perfect to exist.

And he knows that’s weird.

He knows there has to be a reason she is the way she is. He just has absolutely no comprehension of what that reason is. So part of his fascination with Lana is the puzzle. And he spends quite a lot of this series being very confident that he has finally read her correctly. Only to find that, once again, he hasn’t.

What saves Logan from becoming an arrogant arse is that he can self-check. He can admit when he has got something wrong. Every time he rereads Lana and understands her a little better, he seems to like what he finds even more.

I love that about him.

And his constant quest to understand this woman is part of the payoff and part of the attraction between them. Because Lana has to put on an act around Logan, and everyone, really. She’s an incredibly complex, competent woman, who also happens to be a serial killer. But she doesn’t hoodwink the FBI by performing weakness around them.

She performs softness.

And the difference is what makes her whole relationship with Logan possible. She doesn’t pretend to be stupid. She doesn’t pretend to be helpless. She doesn’t play a bimbo. She’s clever, witty, sassy, right from the start, not just with Logan but with all of them.

Lana is still very much herself.

She just presents herself as softer and less capable than she actually is. The full extent of her strength is hidden, rather than Lana presenting herself as a persona she has to perform. And honestly, that’s the cleverest possible way to do it because these people are profilers.

If Lana walked into a room full of profilers trying to perform an entirely fake personality, they would notice. So she doesn’t. She gives them a real version of herself.

Just not all of it.

The irony in this book is obvious. Logan has been hunting a serial killer, rather unimaginatively named The Boogeyman, for the whole series so far. Sidetracked sees him pulled away from his investigation of the Delaney Grove murders to deal with The Boogeyman.

Yep. He’s sidetracked 😏

In the course of the investigation Logan becomes concerned that the serial killer he’s chasing might target Lana. He goes full saviour mode with her because, as far as he knows, she is in danger because of him and his job.

And he’s so wrong about her in so many ways.

Yet, simultaneously, he is so fucking right.

She does need him to protect her. Just not in the way he thinks.

That makes the whole FBI protection situation both hilarious and slightly infuriating.

Yes, there is something infantilising and condescending about Lana telling him she doesn’t need protecting and Logan deciding he knows best and doing it anyway. But what else is he supposed to do?

As far as Logan knows, the woman he is falling in love with is being targeted by a serial killer because of him. He can hardly shrug and say, Well, she says she’s fine.

The problem isn’t that he wants to protect Lana. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is he’s applying a completely generic interpretation of how you protect a vulnerable woman to a woman who doesn’t fit the mould.

It isn’t protection designed for Lana specifically.

And I think that is what gets under her skin. She spends so much effort making sure people underestimate her. She needs Logan not to see everything. But he is also the one person she desperately wants to see and accept her.

It’s made worse because there was once a version of Lana who really was vulnerable. She really did need protecting. 

And nobody came to save her.

Now Logan looks at the woman she became after surviving all of that and still sees somebody who needs protecting. He doesn’t understand what she’s actually become. He correctly deduces she needs his protection. 

He just has no fucking clue what she needs protecting from.

The Boogeyman Works Better As A Contrast Than A Threat

The Boogeyman in this story turns out to be a chap by the name of Plemmons who, bizarrely, is not really an antagonist for Lana.

He’s an antagonist for Logan.

For Lana, he’s practically a footnote.

The FBI team spend all their time running around trying to figure out who he is, how he operates, and what he is going to do next. Lana gets him almost immediately. She gives Logan the insight needed to figure out who he is. 

Honestly, she would have made a phenomenal profiler.

But Plemmons gives the book something Lana desperately needs: contrast. They’re both serial killers. They’re not remotely the same. Lana has a moral code. She takes extreme measures because she believes she is holding people accountable.

Plemmons likes causing pain.

He hurts people because he enjoys hurting people. Without somebody like him on the page, it would be much easier to lose sight of the difference. Unfortunately, that same contrast is also the one real weakness I have with this book.

The Boogeyman never feels like an actual threat to Lana. The fact he manages to blindside her surprised me. But the notion that he’s genuinely going to do serious damage to her?

Nah.

Never.

So by the end of the book, when we hit the second ambush and the bookend that closes out Sidetracked and throws us into Scarlet Angel, Lana has been established as far too competent for me to genuinely fear a man like Plemmons could take her down.

So the cliffhanger absolutely works because I need to know what happens next.

It just doesn’t work by making me frightened for Lana’s safety.

The suspense doesn’t come from the threat to Lana’s life, but from gleefully thinking, what the fuck is she going to do to him?!

Does Sidetracked Live Up To The Risk?

Yes. Completely.

The consistency across this series is ridiculous. Sidetracked doesn’t feel better or worse than The Risk. It simply feels like the story continuing exactly as it should. And while The Risk introduces Lana and Logan, Sidetracked starts widening Lana’s world.

Hadley gets under her skin.

Ferguson demonstrates that her morality extends beyond her own vengeance.

Laurel proves that when protecting somebody else conflicts with protecting herself, Lana will choose them.

Logan keeps getting closer without understanding what he is actually getting closer to.

And, almost without noticing it, Lana starts building connections to a world she had already written herself out of.

She knows she’s been sidetracked in this book. She’s just wrong about what she’s been sidetracked from. And figuring that out is where the series really gets juicy.