by Salem Marlowe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 2017
This fun mystery is perfect for supernatural and whodunits fans.
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A widow and divorcée team up to buy a Victorian mansion atop a scenic sea cliff; little do they know their guests will include ghosts and murderers.
A lighthearted mystery, from Marlowe, a pseudonym for Gloria Kruszka (Return to Love, 2016, etc.), that slowly simmers its plot and characters in a natural, unhurried manner. The story follows Eleanor Lela Menard and Maggie Foster as they investigate the house and its environs, decide to buy it, discuss and implement the various renovations, come up with the name the “Inn at Raven’s Crest,” and research the house’s somewhat disturbing history of tragedy and fleeing owners. Marlowe is a master of detail, explaining everything from the dishes they cook to the finer points of restoration. The first sign of something amiss occurs when Maggie thinks she sees someone looking out of a fourth-floor window. Such incidents escalate to rearranged boxes, the feel of hands in the shower, and other increasingly spectral shenanigans, culminating in seeing the various spirits that inhabit Raven’s Crest. After the women discover they can communicate with the ghosts using a digital voice recorder (turning up the volume to decipher their nearly inaudible voices), they begin playing Cupid between long-dead lovers and peacemaker for all who haunt their home. Perhaps most unique about this book, aside from the sociable ghosts, is that the ghosts are not the main story. That, it turns out, is the tale of a flesh-and-blood killer picking off the living guests during a storm that has cut the house off from the rest of the world—but that killer may be thwarted by otherworldly forces. Naturally, the guests are a motley assemblage of suspicious characters. But Marlowe breathes life into this well-worn scenario, not just with the use of spirit helpers, but by making even the most minor characters real and empathetic.
This fun mystery is perfect for supernatural and whodunits fans.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5375-9700-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Natasha Pulley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
Although this sequel doesn’t break new ground, it will appeal strongly to fans of the first book.
More steampunk adventures of a samurai prognosticator, his clockwork octopus, and his human lovers.
Five years after her charming debut novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015), Pulley brings back the main characters for another scramble through the dangers and consequences of clairvoyance. Readers of the first book already know the big reveal: that Keita Mori—the eponymous London watchmaker—has an unusual memory that works both backward and forward. (Readers new to the series should put this book down and start with Watchmaker.) This time Pulley sets the action principally in Japan, where Mori; Thaniel Steepleton, a British translator and diplomat; Grace Carrow Matsumoto, a physicist; and Takiko Pepperharrow, a Kabuki actress and baroness, are working together to foil a samurai’s power grab and turn away a Russian invasion. At least, that’s what Mori’s doing; the others are rushing blindly down paths he’s laid out for them, which may or may not get them where he wants them to go. But if Mori knows what’s coming and what steps they can take to change the future, why doesn’t he just tell them what to do? The answer is half satisfying (because, as in any complicated relationship, communication isn’t always easy; because the characters have wills of their own and might not obey) and half irritating (because if he did, there wouldn’t be much of a story). Pulley’s witty writing and enthusiastically deployed steampunk motifs—clockwork, owls, a mechanical pet, Tesla-inspired electrical drama—enliven a plot that drags in the middle before rushing toward its explosive end. Perhaps more interesting than the plot are the relationships. The characters revolve through a complex pattern of marriages of passion and convenience, sometimes across and sometimes within genders and cultures, punctuated by jealousy and interesting questions about trust.
Although this sequel doesn’t break new ground, it will appeal strongly to fans of the first book.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-330-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2018
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.
If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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