A rousing mystical tale and smashing series finale.
In this third installment of a supernatural trilogy, a ghost hunter and a college graduate’s excursion into magic opens up a world of deities, angels, and the devil himself.
Twenty-four year-old Desiree Macklin is vacationing in Ireland when she first meets Alec Doogan. The author and paranormal researcher seems fascinated by Desiree, who suggests using his “detection equipment” on someone undergoing a religious experience. But their research, including testing for ectoplasm at St. Patrick’s gravesite, prompts a stranger’s warning. Joseph de Alverado, an angel of the Egyptian god Ptah, cautions that they’re “toying with fire.” Dr. Sanantha Mauwad, a Voodou practitioner and Desiree’s psychiatrist, knows that Joseph once served an evil man named Silas. Having once saved Desiree from death, which entailed Voodou goddess Erzulie gifting the young woman a soul, Sanantha flies to Dublin out of concern for her patient. Alec, meanwhile, delves into magic, like spells for summoning spirits, which soon garners a following after its exposure online. But somewhere out there is a threat: Sammael, sometimes called Satan, whom Sanantha battled nearly a decade ago in Washington, D.C., targets Desiree due to her connection with Erzulie. The goddess, wanting revenge against Sammael, may welcome a war, regardless of the potentially disastrous outcome. Hartlove loads this dense, sharply written tale with characters and events. Joining the others in Ireland, for example, are Sanantha’s estranged boyfriend, Simon Herrera, who hasn’t quite finalized his divorce, and FBI Special Agent Jill Bitterman, who’s reinvestigating the Washington case involving the psychiatrist. The steadily paced narrative superbly incorporates different religions, showing distinctions as well as commonalities (including a figure as “the source of all evil in the world”). Though Hartlove strongly ties this novel to the preceding installments, his skillful storytelling ensures that new readers won’t be lost. The trilogy is nevertheless best enjoyed from the start, as there are myriad spoilers in this volume.
A rousing mystical tale and smashing series finale. (dedication, author bio)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949139-68-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Paper Angel Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
