I was very much anticipating reading this novel after immensely enjoying Bolton's debut novel, Sacrifice; Awakening, while a solid work of crime/suspense fiction, failed to live up to brilliance of Sacrifice. The plot of Awakening revolves around a series of murders and disappearances, and the murders are carried out via venomous snakes: adders and taipans. Bolton does an excellent job of building the suspense leading up to the resolution and detailing the trials and turmoils of the protagonist, Clara, a veterinarian who works in rural England. Bolton also keeps the reader, for most of the novel, in the dark with regards to an important factor in Clara's life: very early in the novel, we learn that Clara has some unusual physical feature, and only very slowly is the nature of this feature revealed.

The denouement, however, is where this novel fails where the previous one did not. It is not so much the characters' motives as the manner in which everything unfolds that is the problem; without giving too much away, I shall just say that it seems as if Bolton wrote the climactic scenes as if she had in mind developing a screenplay for moving this novel to the big screen, and the ending winds up seeming too Hollywoodish and even far-fetched. Nevertheless, it was still, overall, a very good novel, and besides providing the chance to enjoy a generally good story, the reader will also receive a nice little education about snakes and religious snake-handling sects.