An engaging supernatural whodunit with a compelling lead and a magical setting.
In Downer’s mystery, a no-nonsense private investigator must navigate a hidden world of magic to find a killer.
Former New York City police detective Sloane West is still grieving the death of her mother, Jane, who died in a violent car accident before the story opens. Now a private detective living on her own with a strangely humanlike cat named Bear, Sloane receives a surprise visit from Harold Huxham, a Canadian lawyer bearing news that she is about to inherit a large estate from grandparents she never knew existed. But just as Huxham is about to show her the papers, a gunman bursts into Sloane’s apartment, shoots Huxham in the head, and fails to kill Sloane—only because she kills him first. These bizarre events send Sloane on a voyage of investigation and discovery, taking her to the tiny community of Denwick on Vancouver Island. There, she finds a small number of tightly connected families who own the land in common and, it transpires, maintain a wiccan coven with abundant magical powers. She is told by her mysterious cousin, Dorathea, that Jane disappeared from their community just before Sloane was born, and that the coven had searched for her in vain. “You and your mum were both wrapped in spells strong enough to keep us from finding you. We are unaware of their source or how she accomplished them.” Shocked, Sloane soon realizes that dark magic was behind her mother’s and grandparents’ deaths. Thrust into a strange world of demons and talking cats, Sloane must plumb the secrets of the Denwick coven to expose the guilty party. This novel is well written and fast-paced, and the methodical process by which Sloan uncovers the secrets of the insular wiccan community will hold the reader’s attention throughout. Sloane West is a sharp, no-nonsense character whose skepticism about the supernatural elements of the story adds an element of realism to a narrative that is otherwise replete with otherworldly elements.
An engaging supernatural whodunit with a compelling lead and a magical setting.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781642474893
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Bella Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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