A nuanced, multifaceted yarn with magical machinations and real-world concerns.
Old curses, witchcraft, and family conflict abound in Dodd’s supernatural novel, one in a series.
In 1940, series protagonist Arista Kelly’s forebear, Barry Kelly, is a dog breeder in California. After a neighbor poisons one of his dogs, Barry enacts revenge by killing the man. In turn, the dead man’s wife puts a curse on the Kelly family, using “dark magick.” In the present, a man named Mateo has been hired to work on Arista Kelly’s home. Something catches Mateo’s eye: a suitcase containing “a cache of papers and trinkets.” The papers include instructions for a vision spell; since Mateo’s young son has sight problems, he takes the case home with him. Upon closer inspection, the vision spell proves to be of little use to Mateo, and his possession of the suitcase starts to cause problems. Meanwhile, Arista’s neighbor, a “strong, well-seasoned witch” named Iris, has gone missing. When Arista and her aunt investigate, they find evidence in Iris’ home of the curse that was put on the Kelly family—Iris, it transpires, is the original hexer’s granddaughter, and she is on her own adventure after having been possessed by Arista’s uncle Fergus. There is a lot going on in the narrative as a colorful assortment of characters go about their business: Mateo’s troubles with the suitcase and Iris’ journey home after finding herself in Spokane are merely the beginning of the “rowdy commotion” to come. In this world of multicolored auras, where characters have to worry about being possessed and are also concerned with, say, buying jewelry for a loved one, the reader never knows how events will develop. Dodd’s descriptions can be a little too on the nose; at one point, “a scowl of hatred brim[s] across” the face of a villain. Still, while some elements are predictable, there is a rich world of magic and conflict to explore before the story reaches its conclusion.
A nuanced, multifaceted yarn with magical machinations and real-world concerns.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781685136581
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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