A brisk, enjoyable supernatural tale of black magic and powerful spells.
In this paranormal sequel, an immortal witch’s past and present collide as an old enemy seeks revenge.
Travis Coman, like other witches, feeds on “mortal essence.” This typically kills mortals, but Travis, a psychologist in Bucharest, Romania, uses an orb and ancestral magic to ingest patients’ essences nonlethally. It’s a way for his coven and mortals to peacefully coexist, alleviating witches’ fears of detection. Sadly, as Travis is still perfecting this technique, the orb seemingly infects recent patient Marku Catargiu with a murderous demon. By the time Travis realizes a student named Andrei may also be infected, the young man and his father, Stefan, are in Sussex, Vermont—the place the witch first experimented with his family’s magic. Travis and his female friend and fellow witch Sorinah make the overseas trip to cast the demon out, unaware that a vengeance-minded witch awaits them in Vermont. This elaborate revenge scheme against Travis also involves local mortal Rachel, whose recurring nightmares amazingly lead her to a body—possibly that of her best friend who disappeared four years ago. Travis fights to save Andrei as well as protect himself and his Sussex friends before the evil witch hurts anyone. Gabriel’s story moves at an impressive pace. Despite abundant dialogue tying this narrative to the first installment, scenes and conversations are effectively concise. Even readers new to the series will easily follow the mostly linear plot. Action comes in quick bursts and comprises such entertaining bits as a witch capable of “shifting”—inhabiting an animal with a vicious bite. Standouts among the solid cast include smart and reliable Sorinah, often the voice of reason (even when using witches’ telepathic “transference”), and Rachel, whose haunting dreams may indicate a psychic ability. The engaging story boasts gleeful twists and betrayals, though some readers will see them coming. The ending opens intriguing doors for further installments.
A brisk, enjoyable supernatural tale of black magic and powerful spells.Pub Date: May 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9979449-5-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gramercy Fiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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