A satisfying whodunit with a persuasive folk-magic element.
A modern-day witch calls on a powerful magical ability in order to solve a murder in Gardner’s debut paranormal mystery.
Before she commits suicide, Kitty, a homeless woman with Alzheimer’s disease, hands her friend—a Salem, Massachusetts, witch named Lily Scott—a key and exhorts her to “find the truth.” Later, Lily finds Jolene Williams, a witch and a leader of the Dark Moon Coven who wants to take over St. Bridget’s Homeless Shelter, horribly murdered. Lily investigates using her secret power to travel in people’s dreams—or “dream-walk”—but it’s an ability that she’s hesitant to use due to a past tragedy. The novel presents a thoroughly researched view of witchcraft and the Wicca religion, as when Ann, the owner of St. Bridget’s, tells Lily she owes Jolene money, and Lily reflects on “The Wiccan ‘Three-Fold Law’…[which] warns that whatever harm you do to others will return to you three times over.” Sometimes the sentences become appealingly punchy, such as when Lily, as a youngster, surreptitiously uses her grandmother’s Book of Secrets to dream-walk for the first time and meets a figure called the Dream Stalker: “I can’t move, can’t run. A figure appears out of the fog….The Stalker grabs me…I can’t breathe. He drags me backwards.” However, one wishes that the novel better balanced Lily’s characterization with the demands of the mystery genre, especially as the narrative is rendered in the first person. Even so, the dream-walking sequences stand out: “Thousands of embedded crystal stones sparkle along the walls on either side of me. Each stone stores a memory.” The novel also contains several shocking plot twists that will keep readers compelled all the way to the novel’s conclusion.
A satisfying whodunit with a persuasive folk-magic element.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-391994-4
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.
A disturbing household secret has far-reaching consequences in this dark, unusual ghost story.
Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and recovering from a recent tragedy, has taken a job as a nanny for an affluent couple living in the upscale suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey, when a series of strange events start to make her (and her employers) question her own sanity. Teddy, the precocious and shy 5-year-old boy she's charged with watching, seems to be haunted by a ghost who channels his body to draw pictures that are far too complex and well formed for such a young child. At first, these drawings are rather typical: rabbits, hot air balloons, trees. But then the illustrations take a dark turn, showcasing the details of a gruesome murder; the inclusion of the drawings, which start out as stick figures and grow increasingly more disturbing and sophisticated, brings the reader right into the story. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Rekulak does a great job with character development: Mallory, who narrates in the first person, has an engaging voice; the Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child.
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81934-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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