An enchanting novel of a woman finding her way out of a midlife (and mid-death) crisis.
In Alexander’s lighthearted supernatural mystery, a newly single clairvoyant attempts to crack a cold case involving the ghosts that haunt her residence.
Tipsy Collins, the recently divorced mother of three, just wants to get her life in order. She’s hoping the move into an old house in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, will give her the space to figure out who she is again. The only problem? Tipsy is a clairvoyant—albeit a reluctant one. It’s an ability she’s had since childhood, though she’s learned to ignore the ghosts that she’s occasionally seen and heard since then. The house in Mount Pleasant, however, is home to two ghosts, Jane and Henry Mott, and as soon as she moves in Tipsy makes the mistake of acknowledging them. What’s more, the two ghosts are not on speaking terms. Jane claims that Henry is responsible for their deaths—that he killed Jane and then himself—but Henry insists otherwise. “Supposedly she was murdered. Perhaps I did commit suicide,” says the sensitive specter. “I have faults. Too many to name. But I’m not a murderer.” Now, in addition to trying to wrest alimony from her ex, restart her stalled career as a painter, and dip her toes back into the dating world, Tipsy needs to solve a double murder from 1923 in order to put her ghostly roommates to rest. Alexander blends the warm humor of her characters with balmy descriptions of her Southern gothic setting. Her descriptions of Tipsy’s paintings are particularly lyrical: “She blended the paints into an autumnal spectrum, tinting burnt orange to pumpkin and shading white to cream to caramel. Most of the lightest tones went to his shirt and skin. A gradual fade of auburn to russet brown in his freckles and brows and lashes eased the bright red shock of his hair.” It’s a breezy paranormal read, and yet one with more depth than the reader might expect from the premise. In Tipsy and her ghosts, Alexander finds a story about the frustrations of love and aging, as well as the weight that history places on the living, particularly, perhaps, in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
An enchanting novel of a woman finding her way out of a midlife (and mid-death) crisis.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64704-050-5
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Bublish, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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