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Trapped
It’s the middle of the hurricane season. A potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm is raging in the Atlantic Ocean and threatening to make landfall onto Fort Lauderdale beach in the next twenty-four hours. The media has dubbed it “The Storm of the Century.” The entire East Coast of the United States, and particularly the state of Florida, is on edge. Secrets, a luxury beachfront condominium is in the direct path of Hurricane Eloise. The vicious storm is packing winds of over one hundred and fifty miles an hour with torrential rains and the potential of severe flooding. Most of the affluent residents of the building have followed the governor’s orders and evacuated. For a variety of reasons, a small number of occupants have been forced to stay behind in their apartments and ride out the storm there. Lara Kelly, a dedicated home healthcare worker is busy tending to the needs of her favorite elderly patient and attempting to make him safe during the storm. Suddenly things go awry and she finds herself trapped in the building. In this exciting tale, Lara and several others in the building are forced to face their own fears and unite to defend themselves against three murdering, looting thugs who have broken into the condominium building. The next forty-eight hours are harrowing and filled with both heartwarming and dangerous situations. The story is a page turner and you will not be able to put the book down.
212 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 28, 2020
46 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Peggy Chernow
15 books10 followersPeggy Chernow grew up in the affluent Maryland suburbs, outside of Washington, D.C. It was in the era of boarding schools, dancing cotillions, country clubs, and debutante parties. As a young girl, she traveled the world with her father, a photographer for National Geographic, and has incorporated a lifetime of interesting places and experiences into her work.
Peggy had to cope with the dual tragedies of losing her mother to breast cancer and her 15-year-old daughter in a tragic motorcycle accident. Yet despite these heartbreaks, this spunky author takes life's challenges and turns them into entertaining, humorous, and riveting stories.
Peggy had to cope with the dual tragedies of losing her mother to breast cancer and her 15-year-old daughter in a tragic motorcycle accident. Yet despite these heartbreaks, this spunky author takes life's challenges and turns them into entertaining, humorous, and riveting stories.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 9, 2025
Excellent book. Too realistic at times. Glad I don't live in an area with hurricanes
December 18, 2021
Lara Kelly completed the task of getting her elderly patient, Mr. Preston, ready to weather the storm in his high-rise condo. But that night, when he doesn’t return her check-up call, she fears something bad has happened to him. So she sneaks out of her erstwhile boyfriend’s house to make a quick check on her patient, who lives on the 11th floor. Serendipitously she is forced to take shelter at Seacrest/Seascape Condominiums when the bridges close to the barrier island.
Brad Stone is a successful suspense writer who has fled NYC. It is also convenient that he’s an former cop from the NYPD who walked away from the life after realizing that he wasn’t suited to police work. He seems to be independently wealthy as he lives in a penthouse on the 26th floor. This is his first hurricane and like so many other transplants he fails to heed the severity of the warnings about this Category 4 storm.
I have so many problems with this story that it is difficult to know where to begin. So I’ll begin with the building itself. The author apparently couldn’t decide on the building name. It alternates between Seacrest and Seascape. This was quite disconcerting to me as it took me a couple of chapters to realize that this was an editing problem. Next I failed to comprehend how any building on a barrier island could survive a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane with minimal damage. This reader lived through a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2005 and I can assure you the damage to barrier island condos was way more than minimal.
It’s always pleasant to read a contemporary romance and the growing relationship between Brad and Lara is no exception in Trapped. They manage to overcome the usual obstacles – no electricity, no air conditioning, although there seemed to be no shortage of food and drink in any of the resident’s apartments; even though the Bennetts and Brad had little to no time to pick up any staples they might need. But it amazed me that within 2-3 hours of the storm’s passing the building was up and running with electrical power. Sure, the electrical service was buried underground but the grid it is hooked up to would have been unable to provide service for at least several more hours if not more on a barrier island.
And another question is brought to mind: with the police showing up at the condo building to make a after-storm check, how is it that the roads were clear enough for a vehicle to pass after only a couple of hours? After Hurricane Ivan the beach roads were impassable for weeks because they were buried under two feet of sand! It would have taken days if not weeks for the street in front of Seacrest/Seascape Condos to be cleared. And why did the police arrive at this particular condo complex ahead of all the others on the beach? Perhaps the mayor or a councilman had a residence there? Perhaps the story could have been expanded to see how the characters coped with an extended wait for help and how they dealt with the thugs who were looting over a greater period of time.
One irritating flaw of the Brad character was that he seemed to constantly be saying he’d fill someone (Lara, Larry, etc.) in on what transpired or about a backstory. Problem for me was that he, Brad, never followed up on those things. The character of Mr. Preston, the elderly patient, was the highlight of the story.
Overall, Trapped was a predictable story. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they get married and a Happily Ever After ensues. There was quite a bit of repetitive text, lack of details, and a much greater lack of dialogue. The looters should have created suspense but they served as more two dimensional characters lifted from a comic book. For me Trapped was not so much a suspense thriller as it was a romance novel using a hurricane as a backdrop.
A good editor would have caught many of the discrepancies in the story. As a romance it works; as a suspense thriller it simply does not.
Brad Stone is a successful suspense writer who has fled NYC. It is also convenient that he’s an former cop from the NYPD who walked away from the life after realizing that he wasn’t suited to police work. He seems to be independently wealthy as he lives in a penthouse on the 26th floor. This is his first hurricane and like so many other transplants he fails to heed the severity of the warnings about this Category 4 storm.
I have so many problems with this story that it is difficult to know where to begin. So I’ll begin with the building itself. The author apparently couldn’t decide on the building name. It alternates between Seacrest and Seascape. This was quite disconcerting to me as it took me a couple of chapters to realize that this was an editing problem. Next I failed to comprehend how any building on a barrier island could survive a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane with minimal damage. This reader lived through a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2005 and I can assure you the damage to barrier island condos was way more than minimal.
It’s always pleasant to read a contemporary romance and the growing relationship between Brad and Lara is no exception in Trapped. They manage to overcome the usual obstacles – no electricity, no air conditioning, although there seemed to be no shortage of food and drink in any of the resident’s apartments; even though the Bennetts and Brad had little to no time to pick up any staples they might need. But it amazed me that within 2-3 hours of the storm’s passing the building was up and running with electrical power. Sure, the electrical service was buried underground but the grid it is hooked up to would have been unable to provide service for at least several more hours if not more on a barrier island.
And another question is brought to mind: with the police showing up at the condo building to make a after-storm check, how is it that the roads were clear enough for a vehicle to pass after only a couple of hours? After Hurricane Ivan the beach roads were impassable for weeks because they were buried under two feet of sand! It would have taken days if not weeks for the street in front of Seacrest/Seascape Condos to be cleared. And why did the police arrive at this particular condo complex ahead of all the others on the beach? Perhaps the mayor or a councilman had a residence there? Perhaps the story could have been expanded to see how the characters coped with an extended wait for help and how they dealt with the thugs who were looting over a greater period of time.
One irritating flaw of the Brad character was that he seemed to constantly be saying he’d fill someone (Lara, Larry, etc.) in on what transpired or about a backstory. Problem for me was that he, Brad, never followed up on those things. The character of Mr. Preston, the elderly patient, was the highlight of the story.
Overall, Trapped was a predictable story. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they get married and a Happily Ever After ensues. There was quite a bit of repetitive text, lack of details, and a much greater lack of dialogue. The looters should have created suspense but they served as more two dimensional characters lifted from a comic book. For me Trapped was not so much a suspense thriller as it was a romance novel using a hurricane as a backdrop.
A good editor would have caught many of the discrepancies in the story. As a romance it works; as a suspense thriller it simply does not.
January 20, 2021
I enjoyed this book and read it in two days. I thought it would be more about the hurricane but it focused more on the human intruders. A nasty bunch! I enjoyed the connection the three parties made during they’re time being “Trapped” I thought the last few chapters could have been condensed, it didn’t need three chapters for the wedding. And I’d like to know what Steven said about the breakup. All in all, I did enjoy this book.
July 19, 2021
Predictable from the first page. Superficial characters.
August 7, 2021
Actually giving this a 3.5. It was entertaining, but I was expecting more of a "nature" thriller/adventure than a romance book.
February 2, 2025
As far as hurricane themed books go, this was barely a tropical depression
Hurricane Eloise is bearing down on the Florida Peninsula. The potentially deadly storm has its sights set on the Southeastern coast with Fort Lauderdale Beach in the crosshairs. Mandatory evacuations have been called and all bridges into and out of the barrier islands have been shut down. Any residents choosing to ride out the deadly storm are advised to do so at their own risk. For the remaining residents of the Seascape Condo the storm rolling in brings challenges of its own. As one of the newer condo towers in the area building codes lend toward a more secure structure so a handful of residents have decided to stay behind in their units. During the pounding rains and the howling winds another threat lurks as a band of looters have gained access to the condo and are using the storm’s wrath as a cover for their crime spree. A small group of brave residents seek to track the criminals and bring them to justice with or without police intervention.
I feel I need to start this review by stating that I was clearly not the audience that this author was writing for. This book came up as a suggestion on my social media feed and I was immediately interested based on the title and cover art alone, and after having good experiences with similarly marketed ads I gave this title a purchase. As a life-long Florida resident who has a career also dealing closely with Hurricanes and other natural disasters I was immediately drawn in by the title and the synopsis. I jumped into Trapped blindly, expecting an epic Florida based disaster novel with the hurricane as the main character and gripping chapters chock full of destruction, tribulation and the eventual triumph of the beleaguered survivors of the battered and destroyed Seascape Condo. That is not at all what I got. At best what I got was a romance, with a rainy backdrop as the “potentially deadly” hurricane was more of background noise and barely an afterthought. It was only after reading Trapped that I read the author’s bio and discovered that she mainly writes romance. Had I known that going in, I probably still would have read this title, but possibly wouldn’t have felt as disappointed with a “bait and switch” story as I do now.
If I were to rate this solely as a romance and not a disaster novel, I would say that while a tad cliché, the romance aspect of the story was alright. Looking at this from a hurricane-based disaster, this was weak. I felt that there could have been so much more the author could have explored with the hurricane itself and the potential destruction than she did. Additionally, the topic of hurricanes in Florida, particularly the naming of hurricanes, could have been better researched. The hurricane name used in this book “Eloise” was retired from the naming list in 1975 due to the destruction caused. This is a continuity error that not many people will catch but could have been avoided with a little more research.
Lastly and it pains me to do this as I try to stay away from critiquing spelling and grammar and focus only on the story, but especially after reading this author’s August 2022 blog post about “the importance of knowing how to spell and use words correctly” I feel that I would be remiss not to point this out. If this author is not using a proofreader she really needs to be. With mistakes such as “neckless” instead of “necklace”, rose “pedals” not rose “petals”, and the one that even had my teenage son cringe when a man was “plummeted” with another’s fists (pummeled maybe?), it just seems that this book could really have benefited from a final read through and round of editing. That was just the discrepancies that I noted in Trapped as I believe there were others, and to think that this author has at least 6 other published books out there. Hopefully they were better edited.
If you are already a fan of this author and know what to expect, then I would believe that Trapped will be enjoyable. I, for one, will be hard pressed to read any more titles in her library.
Hurricane Eloise is bearing down on the Florida Peninsula. The potentially deadly storm has its sights set on the Southeastern coast with Fort Lauderdale Beach in the crosshairs. Mandatory evacuations have been called and all bridges into and out of the barrier islands have been shut down. Any residents choosing to ride out the deadly storm are advised to do so at their own risk. For the remaining residents of the Seascape Condo the storm rolling in brings challenges of its own. As one of the newer condo towers in the area building codes lend toward a more secure structure so a handful of residents have decided to stay behind in their units. During the pounding rains and the howling winds another threat lurks as a band of looters have gained access to the condo and are using the storm’s wrath as a cover for their crime spree. A small group of brave residents seek to track the criminals and bring them to justice with or without police intervention.
I feel I need to start this review by stating that I was clearly not the audience that this author was writing for. This book came up as a suggestion on my social media feed and I was immediately interested based on the title and cover art alone, and after having good experiences with similarly marketed ads I gave this title a purchase. As a life-long Florida resident who has a career also dealing closely with Hurricanes and other natural disasters I was immediately drawn in by the title and the synopsis. I jumped into Trapped blindly, expecting an epic Florida based disaster novel with the hurricane as the main character and gripping chapters chock full of destruction, tribulation and the eventual triumph of the beleaguered survivors of the battered and destroyed Seascape Condo. That is not at all what I got. At best what I got was a romance, with a rainy backdrop as the “potentially deadly” hurricane was more of background noise and barely an afterthought. It was only after reading Trapped that I read the author’s bio and discovered that she mainly writes romance. Had I known that going in, I probably still would have read this title, but possibly wouldn’t have felt as disappointed with a “bait and switch” story as I do now.
If I were to rate this solely as a romance and not a disaster novel, I would say that while a tad cliché, the romance aspect of the story was alright. Looking at this from a hurricane-based disaster, this was weak. I felt that there could have been so much more the author could have explored with the hurricane itself and the potential destruction than she did. Additionally, the topic of hurricanes in Florida, particularly the naming of hurricanes, could have been better researched. The hurricane name used in this book “Eloise” was retired from the naming list in 1975 due to the destruction caused. This is a continuity error that not many people will catch but could have been avoided with a little more research.
Lastly and it pains me to do this as I try to stay away from critiquing spelling and grammar and focus only on the story, but especially after reading this author’s August 2022 blog post about “the importance of knowing how to spell and use words correctly” I feel that I would be remiss not to point this out. If this author is not using a proofreader she really needs to be. With mistakes such as “neckless” instead of “necklace”, rose “pedals” not rose “petals”, and the one that even had my teenage son cringe when a man was “plummeted” with another’s fists (pummeled maybe?), it just seems that this book could really have benefited from a final read through and round of editing. That was just the discrepancies that I noted in Trapped as I believe there were others, and to think that this author has at least 6 other published books out there. Hopefully they were better edited.
If you are already a fan of this author and know what to expect, then I would believe that Trapped will be enjoyable. I, for one, will be hard pressed to read any more titles in her library.
April 1, 2025
I've had this book for awhile but finally read it. There's alot going on in this book & doesn't focus on the hurricane much. I'll break down the issues I have with it.
First, a category 4 hurricane making a direct hit. The Seascape (name kept changing in the book)would not have come out of that with minimal damage or just a dirty pool. No storm surge?? Seriously? In a Cat 4 storm? No debris on the roadways that the police were all able to show up within an hour of the storm passing. Have you ever seen coastal areas after a hurricane? It's devastation & weeks, months, even years worth of clean up & repairs.
I've been through numerous hurricanes and never have I been so relaxed that I'd be slow dancing to Frank Sinatra during it in a condo full of windows. Come on now. I realize it's fiction but this is just absurd.
Sure, there's a love story. Boy meets girl, they instantly fall in love and suddenly become best friends with everyone they met during the storm but before they live happily ever after they have to trap & capture looters and murderers. Single handedly, with flickering electricity in a building that 26 stories high in a Cat 4 storm. Wow.
First, a category 4 hurricane making a direct hit. The Seascape (name kept changing in the book)would not have come out of that with minimal damage or just a dirty pool. No storm surge?? Seriously? In a Cat 4 storm? No debris on the roadways that the police were all able to show up within an hour of the storm passing. Have you ever seen coastal areas after a hurricane? It's devastation & weeks, months, even years worth of clean up & repairs.
I've been through numerous hurricanes and never have I been so relaxed that I'd be slow dancing to Frank Sinatra during it in a condo full of windows. Come on now. I realize it's fiction but this is just absurd.
Sure, there's a love story. Boy meets girl, they instantly fall in love and suddenly become best friends with everyone they met during the storm but before they live happily ever after they have to trap & capture looters and murderers. Single handedly, with flickering electricity in a building that 26 stories high in a Cat 4 storm. Wow.
February 16, 2021
Engrossing
Totally packed with action and enhanced by characteristics of the people involved. Hurricane, people,, and action present. I could not put this book down. Absolutely the best book I have read in a long time. Wow
Totally packed with action and enhanced by characteristics of the people involved. Hurricane, people,, and action present. I could not put this book down. Absolutely the best book I have read in a long time. Wow
March 19, 2021
Trapped
I like this book..believable characters etc..but the description asked if you ever wondered what it was like being in a Category 5 hurricane..but it seemed less about than about the looters..I wanted more storm..
I like this book..believable characters etc..but the description asked if you ever wondered what it was like being in a Category 5 hurricane..but it seemed less about than about the looters..I wanted more storm..
April 4, 2022
Very good book! I loved the character's.
I enjoyed it very much! The love story was very sweet but a bit old fashioned I thought. A bit of a slow read and easy to put down but all in all a good story
I enjoyed it very much! The love story was very sweet but a bit old fashioned I thought. A bit of a slow read and easy to put down but all in all a good story
July 13, 2025
It took about 40 pages for there to even begin a plot but once it started it took off. I think most of the male characters gave me the creeps and I think the language used to describe the thief’s was… a little outdated.
January 29, 2021
Excellent book and very quick, easy read!
October 11, 2021
Trapped is a great read. 5 stars!!
November 9, 2024
Great story , I feel like I know the people in the book personally. Great book and can’t wait to read more books by the author.
February 23, 2022
Trapped
This wasn’t as suspenseful as I originally thought, but overall it was easy reading and more of a happy ever after story. The story was interesting and didn’t falter.
Some edge of your seat, some sappy. A good read.
This wasn’t as suspenseful as I originally thought, but overall it was easy reading and more of a happy ever after story. The story was interesting and didn’t falter.
Some edge of your seat, some sappy. A good read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews