An entertaining tale that’s sure to leave readers anticipating the protagonist’s next misadventure.
In this comedic, supernatural series starter, a San Diego private eye finds himself caught in the middle of a brewing war between mythical beings.
One day in 2013,private detective John Smith is attacked by humanoid crabs that he initially, and mistakenly, thinks are men in costume. Before the crab-men can kill him, a stranger named Anastasia Dumenyova comes to his rescue. She takes him to House Borghesi, a home for vampires who call themselves “the People.” Humans have long been unaware of the existence of such paranormal beings in their midst, which also include goblins and shape-shifters, among others. To avoid open warfare between certain species, these beings work with mediators. Evidently, John is the last mediator available in the area—except that he isn’t one, really; he just added “mediation” to his advertisement for the rhyme (reflected in the book’s title). Currently, Lord Beel-Kasan, the demigod of nightmares and terror, is accusing the House of stealing something. John is willing to mediate, as it’s preferable to being killed by one of the People. It’s soon apparent, however, that the theft may have been committed specifically to incite a war. Anastasia surmises that there’s a traitor in the House and secretly enlists John to dig into the matter, although Juliette, the vampire she suspects, points the finger right back at her. Tullbane, the author of The Storm in Her Smile (2020), presents a consistently amusing story. It effectively introduces a creature-laden world, but it concentrates mainly on the vampiric People. The action is minimal, however; John spends an inordinate amount of time in the House as the target of vampires’ body-shaming, for example. But both the action and the investigation pick up in the final act, and the appeal of certain characters, namely spiky-haired Juliette, surges. There are abundant pop-culture references, but the plot never relies upon them. Some enigmas are left at the end for sequels to explore, such as John’s inexplicable immunity to the People’s supernatural “compulsion.”
An entertaining tale that’s sure to leave readers anticipating the protagonist’s next misadventure.Pub Date: May 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73348-245-5
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Ghost Falls Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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