An entertaining romp, blending stylish storytelling and creepy carnage.
Supernatural husband-and-wife detectives—he’s a vampire, she’s a werewolf—take down paranormal perps in this rollicking horror fantasy.
Goodridge’s yarn opens in 1914, when New York police detective Madison Cavendish teams up with clairvoyant milliner Seneca Sue SunMountain (the police commissioner’s wife swears by her prophetic visions) to investigate the disappearance of a Broadway singer. Their encounter with the prime suspect, a tentacled, magenta-colored monster from the cosmic void, gets them killed and then reborn as vamp and lycanthrope, blessed with immortality, super-strength, and a primal bloodlust that they rein in with hyssop-oil tea; cementing their bond is their shared experience as light-skinned Black people passing as white in a racist society. After forming a private detective agency, their cases include a series of attacks by a were-hyena, which may implicate novelist Zora Neale Hurston and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance; a magic box containing a dangerous Persian demon that’s desperately sought by New York’s occult circles; and a vicious “blue devil dog” terrorizing West Virginia. Later chapters set in the 1960s and 70s feel grittier: Madison fights in Vietnam, where he slaughters dozens of Vietcong soldiers and spies a strange woman who hovers in the air and feasts on the corpses of the men he killed. The author sets a vivid, teeming fictive world of oddball characters and lurid creatures against an atmospheric portrait of Black New York and Harlem from their Jazz Age glory to the bleak 1970s era of heroin and street crime. With its juxtaposition of Madison and Sue’s usually affectionate banter and monster-of-the-month adventures, the novel often feels like a mash-up of The Thin Man and Ghostbusters. Goodridge’s elegant prose alternates between the jauntily picaresque and darker, gorier vibes when Madison and Sue unleash their beastly natures (“Sue, crouched over Octavius on hands and knees, ripped at his neck to the point of separating the poor soul’s head from the rest of his body”). The result is good, scary fun.
An entertaining romp, blending stylish storytelling and creepy carnage.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781957224411
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Current Words Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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