I’ll admit the cover drew me in, but it wasn’t just the image. It was the positioning. The trail of blood, the cruiser parked at the edge of the shot, the empty road splitting the woods. The title font is bold, distressed, and pieced together like a ransom note. Jagged, uneven, mismatched. It looks torn from different sources and forced into place. The author’s name appears at the bottom in a smaller version of the same fractured style. It doesn’t feel designed. It feels unstable. Like the scene itself, something has already gone wrong. And then it hits you. You’re not just observing it. You’re in the car, just outside the frame. Headlights on. Engine idling. The scene is frozen, but you’re already part of it. That’s not just a good cover. That’s the entire story in metaphor.
And yes, this is a novella. It comes in under 200 pages, but nothing about it feels incomplete. Tina S. Transformation doesn’t waste a single sentence. There’s no warm-up and no time spent building a world you’ll never return to. She goes straight to the point. The pacing isn’t about speed for its own sake. It’s about emotional pressure. The violence that unfolds isn’t cinematic. It’s weight. What you’re reading isn’t a series of events. It’s what happens when consequence replaces justice.
The voice doesn’t ease in. It opens mid-confession, already wrecked and already done making excuses. “I walked into hell with open arms,” the narrator says, and nothing about it feels exaggerated. There’s no moral framing, no justification. Just someone who understands exactly what they allowed, and exactly what they’re about to become. It reads like a Batman origin stripped of myth and mask. No cape. No rules. Just a voice that has been broken and rebuilt into purpose. By the time she says, “I no longer exist to be broken. I exist to break them. Now, I serve justice in the dark. I hunt,” it no longer feels like a threat. It feels like truth. That is one heck of an internal manifesto.
The structure doesn’t waste time. The chapters are short. The sentences stripped to the bone. There’s no time for reflection, only movement. Decisions. Clean impact. It doesn’t slow down to let you think. It keeps going because the narrator already has. The restraint isn’t there to tease tension. It’s there because there’s no energy left for anything else. That’s what makes the story hit.
Some readers might want more time to settle in. More clarity. More room to ask why. But this story doesn’t wait for that. It doesn’t need to. This is fiction without a governor. The brakes are cut. There’s no turning back once it starts. I’ve written stories that drop the reader into the middle of collapse from page one. I know how hard that is to pull off. Tina doesn’t flinch. She strips the narrative down to its truth and holds it there.
Man Hunt isn’t just about vengeance. It’s about failure. In more states than not, the criminal justice system doesn’t just fall short. It collapses. It protects the wrong people, delays the inevitable, and leaves victims with nothing but the echo of what should have been done. And fiction like this, whether readers are ready for it or not, is what seeps through. Rage. Perseverance. Violence. That’s what fills the silence. This book doesn’t just ask what happens when justice fails. It asks what kind of silence we’re willing to live with when it does.
Yes, I still admire that cover.