Cottam (The Lucifer Chord, 2018, etc.) is a masterly maven of the deeply disturbing occult. His latest may well leave you...
A mythical book holds the key to terrifying events.
In a London suburb, an altar boy hears troubling noises coming from a coffin, but fellow altar boy Peter Jackson hears nothing. Back home, Peter mentions the phenomenon to his clever sister, Dawn, who calls it the Auguries, a manifestation of the unrestful dead described in an ancient book they’ve discovered among their grandfather’s possessions. The two lived with their grandfather, but when he died, Dawn refused to call the authorities. So they’re living off his debit card while an unconcerned Dawn uses the information in the book. Her first experiment involves cutting off the head of their pet fish, who continues to swim around. Her next is killing Peter and raising him from the dead. Suddenly odd and alarming things start to happen. An excursion boats sinks in the Thames with no survivors. Statues all over London begin to bleed. Professor Juliet Harrington, an expert on the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom, a lost volume thought to have been written in the 16th century, is called to a meeting with the Home Secretary, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who ask about the Auguries, which, she explains, occur whenever someone uses the book. Juliet believes the volume was compiled in 1530 by a group of occult practitioners led by the German alchemist Gunter Keller. When the calamities continue with an outbreak of the plague and a plane crash, Juliet is commissioned to track down the book and find whomever is using it. The pressure mounts as London undergoes disaster after disaster and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Cottam (The Lucifer Chord, 2018, etc.) is a masterly maven of the deeply disturbing occult. His latest may well leave you with nightmares.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8869-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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