Echoes of real world events bring deeper darkness, and brighter light, to Barlow’s finale.
Barlow concludes her trilogy with a battle between a killer who can resurrect the dead and the ultimate evil.
Jack Harper grew up in a cult that trained her to kill. Her adoptive father, Cyrus, built a network of evil to do the bidding of the Builder, a manipulative creature that feeds off the world’s ills. Now free of Cyrus, Jack plans to take on the Builder, pitting her ability to control those she kills against its own formidable powers. Joining her is a group of “ferrics,” the Builder’s ancestral enemies, and among them is Lutin, who gave Jack her resurrection talent. While Jack and Lutin are “two halves of the same heart,” not all of the ferrics trust her. As the group travels to the Builder’s otherworldly domain, betrayal is in the offing. Strange events ensue, including translocation and a plan that involves “godsoul,” a healing miracle substance doled out by the Guardian. In a last-ditch effort to eliminate innocence from the world, the Builder uses Jack’s brother to unleash a pandemic. With humanity at stake, will Jack run out of maneuvers to halt the Builder’s hunger? Barlow ends the Jack Harper trilogy with more of what hooked fans from the start—inventive plotting, consistently high stakes, and emotional realism. Jack still shoots her way out of most situations without blinking, but Patrick also kills this time, and he feels that his “heart had been disfigured.” In several surreal moments, readers get closer than ever to the Builder, whose “blank face changes. A mouth forms. Lips. Teeth. It smiles.” The author acknowledges the difficulties wrought by Covid-19 in lines like “the virus...eats the tiniest bit of godsoul from each person.” The winning theme that runs through the series, emphasized in the final volume, is that positive change is possible.
Echoes of real world events bring deeper darkness, and brighter light, to Barlow’s finale.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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