Jenna Ryan’s The Arms of the Law has a bland title and a boring cover, neither of which give a hint to the wonderfully dark suspense novel lurking inside. Kind of like Christie by way of Hitchcock, it has the spooky, menacing feel of a good scary movie. If the love story becomes secondary to the mystery, I was too caught up in the twists and turns of the macabre plot to care.

Seldom is a book’s setting as perfect for its story as the Beldon-Drake Psychiatric Hospital is here. Converted from an old mansion, it sits like a Gothic fortress in an isolated area outside of Boston. Dr. Nikita Sorensen recently returned to the hospital after a stint in the Southwest, just in time for a blizzard to strike. The storm wreaks havoc on the psyches of her patients, and brings something equally unsettling into her own life in the form of Detective Daniel Vachon. They first meet when he and his partner transport a prisoner to the hospital. He returns soon after when a corpse is found on the grounds, the body of a murdered nurse. It’s the first murder to hit the hospital, but not the last.

Nikita knows that none of her patients is a killer. Vachon isn’t quite so sure. He has his reasons for not trusting psychiatrists, but can’t help being drawn to Nikita. He may also be the only one who can keep her safe. Someone at the hospital, either patient or personnel, is a murderer and has targeted her as a future victim. As the bodies pile up, Nikita and Vachon must work together to sort through tangled motives and inner secrets hospital to uncover the twisted mind behind the murders.

This is very much a mystery with a romance subplot rather than outright romantic suspense. The love story does have some effective moments, and the consummation scene is nicely moody and romantic, but this isn’t a story where falling in love is the primary topic on the main characters’ minds, and rightfully so.

As a mystery though, it’s so much fun. It has a definite Hitchcockian vibe, right down to the hospital being described as Spellbound – and then some. It’s very cleverly constructed. There’s a multitude of suspects, from Nikita’s lecherous brother to the eccentric doctor suspected of conducting odd experiments in the basement to the patient with multiple personalities. The author provides plenty of false trails for the characters and the reader to walk down before getting to the truth. But the clues are also all there for the astute reader to pick up on, most likely just before the characters figure it all out, allowing the reader to feel smart without the book coming across as too obvious. And even figuring it out early likely won’t prepare the reader for the gleefully twisted climax. Most satisfying is the ending, which delivers the happy ending for the hero and heroine (the last line of their closing scene is a beautiful touch that nicely turns the killer’s motivation on its head), then goes one step further to close on a nicely creepy final note.

I should probably point out that The Arms of the Law, like many of these types of stories, strains credibility at times, such as the hospital not being closed down after the first murder, or at least after the second. Parts of it need to be taken with a grain of salt, and realism isn’t a high priority. The scary movie analogy is an apt one. It can be over the top, but it’s also the rare romantic suspense novel that delivers some genuine chills. It also helps that Nikita is a strong heroine, who never devolves into tears or desperately turns to, well, the arms of the law, for comfort when things get too scary. Both Nikita and Vachon have interesting backgrounds that make them distinctive characters, so while it’s not a book that’s particularly heavy on character moments, they’re unusual enough to remain compelling.

This isn’t one of Jenna Ryan’s most innovative books, like Bittersweet Legacy (the ending of that one’s a classic) or The Visitor (unlike any other series romance I’ve ever read). But it is my favorite, but it’s the one I think is the strongest overall. The mystery is excellent, the characters are unusual, and the setting is pitch perfect like so few are. It’s not a place I’d ever want to visit in real life, but in this book, it’s one I’ve reread about more times than I can count.