A well-crafted tale of friendship and discovery.
In Alexander’s paranormal mystery, a lawyer looks to the past for answers, assisted by her paranormal abilities, when an important figure from her past goes missing.
Lisa “LeeLee” Lightstone Moretz’s friend Ginny Blankenship had always been able to see glimpses of the past and future—or, as Ginny’s mother described it, she could ride time’s currents as it “roll[ed] from all directions toward its own sea.” When they met as teenagers back in 1995, Ginny felt that they were uniquely connected; as it turned out, LeeLee had similar powers. Not even fated friendships are perfect, though, and they cut off contact with each other seven years later. Thirteen years after that, LeeLee, now an attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, meets with Peace Smith, a former friend and boyfriend to both LeeLee and Ginny. His return to town brings up complicated, unresolved issues for LeeLee; he tells her that he and Ginny broke up a few years before and that Ginny’s been missing since. Soon afterward, LeeLee gets an anonymous email telling her that Ginny is dead; as a result, the troubled Peace is now a prime suspect. As the mystery proceeds, new memories, LeeLee’s visions, and the findings of a private investigator bring more new information to light. Alexander’s characters are well developed and feel authentic throughout. The narrative also has a strong sense of place, which will invest readers not only in the story, but also in the welfare of the community the characters inhabit. The complex, fluid relationships of the main players ebb and flow over time, which reflects reality in a striking way. LeeLee, Peace, and Ginny are all flawed people, but they’re shown to have redeeming qualities, as well; although they all love one another deeply, they’re selfish, secretive, and reckless to varying degrees, despite their best intentions. These traits move the story forward just as much as its supernatural aspects do.
A well-crafted tale of friendship and discovery.Pub Date: July 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781958231548
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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