A darkly enchanting novel of sinister alliances and inescapable histories.
In Slick’s fantasy novel, a woman makes a deal with the devil to save her sister’s life.
Azoma, Louisiana, 1924: Corbin’s Mercantile and Fine Goods is not the most lavish enterprise—just four thin walls and a tin roof selling tools, medicine, and dry goods—but it’s all the Corbin girls have. Their deceased half-Ojibwe father built it, and Beatrice Corbin now operates the shop, though the marijuana-smoking, blues-loving loner mostly prefers to keep her distance from her white neighbors. Her younger sister, Agnes, is more eager to participate in the wider society; in fact, she has just married a respectable and ambitious politician. Beatrice has zero interest in marriage (her husband would immediately take legal ownership of the store, for one thing), though Angelo Davis, the talented blues musician she just met at a jazz joint, has recently caught her eye. When Beatrice accidentally breaks her father’s lucky bottle of whiskey, she consults the local fortune teller to learn what the fallout will be. It turns out to be pretty severe: Agnes will be murdered. There’s no one in Beatrice’s life more important to her than her sister, and so, desperate to save her, she summons the devil to exchange her life for Agnes’. The devil appears in the form of one Frank Charbonneau, an immaculately dressed Cajun stranger recently arrived in town. “I came to do business; that’s my trade in the world,” Frank explains of his earthly existence. “I always love to make a trade. No, I do not always crave souls. I do not hold souls any more than the sun holds time. I just keep track of them for a while. Nor am I the key to evil. I’m simply...chaos.” Frank offers to save Agnes’ life if Beatrice will marry him, but Beatrice makes a counteroffer: She will live with him as his wife, but she will not sleep with him, and if she can figure out who Agnes’ killer will be and prevent the murder before it happens, Frank must release them both from the deal. Marry the devil, solve a murder, save her sister—what could go wrong?
Slick’s gumbo of folklore, music, racial tension, and sultry Southern nights will please fans of the 2025 film Sinners, as this work similarly updates traditional Southern Gothic elements for a tale that feels both timeless and fresh. The plot unfolds are a leisurely pace—perhaps too leisurely at times—but what the story lacks in haste it makes up for in the richness of its setting. “My heart quickened when we entered the raucous place, filled as much with people laughing, as smoke; and people were dancing ragtime to the band’s hip music,” Beatrice reports when describing the jazz joint. “The walls were stained to shoulder height, and the place was about as dusty as Gomorrah.” Frank is a wonderful invention, a trickster with surprisingly complex motivations and a gambler’s impulsivity; perhaps the more impressive creation is Beatrice, who manages to feel both of her time and completely outside of it. This diabolical tale captivates from the start to the finish.
A darkly enchanting novel of sinister alliances and inescapable histories.Pub Date: July 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798218712402
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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