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MEMENTO MORI

From the Haunted New Orleans series , Vol. 1

An often engaging paranormal tale with spice and scares.

A skeptical private investigator encounters romance, hauntings, and a potential serial killer when she returns home to New Orleans in Salvador’s series-starting paranormal thriller.

Hanlen Arbor is a young, queer private investigator who’s still getting over the trauma of her best friend’s murder, which she’s trying to solve.When she returns home from Texas to New Orleans, she expects an uneventful, short trip. That changes when she meets Deveraux “Dev” Glapion, a charming paranormal investigator and Vodou priest of Haitian descent who’s the host of the network TV series Haunted New Orleans. Dev’s show is launching an investigation into Arborwood, Hanlen’s ancestral home, but she doesn’t believe in supernatural phenomena. Complications arise in Hanlen’s murder investigation, bringing her and Dev closer together. The two realize they have much in common despite their drastically different worldviews—specifically, they both still grieve over murdered loved ones whose cases are unsolved. New killings merge the pair’s investigations, and they use their disparate skills to their advantage while navigating their growing attraction to each other. Salvador tells the story from Hanlen and Dev’s alternating first-person perspectives, allowing readers to experience the inner lives of both characters. For the first half of the book, this intriguingly presents two very different views of the supernatural events—one of a skeptic and the other of a true believer. However, as the characters’ beliefs shift, so does the distinctiveness of their voices, eventually making it difficult to determine who’s speaking without context clues. The character development lacks complexity, and a major reveal is hampered slightly by an over-the-top red herring. Still, Salvador’s melding of paranormal romance with clear-cut horror elements is impressive. Arborwood is an excellently crafted haunted house, and this setting, along with the steamy romance, allows for a thoroughly satisfying romp.

An often engaging paranormal tale with spice and scares.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2021

ISBN: 9781648181184

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Lady Boss Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2022

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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