The Prophet by Amanda Stevens

I have now read all the books in The Graveyard Queen series by Amanda Stevens, The Prophet, being the third one; there is a fourth due for release later this year.  I always read a series in order, and I always recommend others do too.  With most series you can start anywhere and then go back to the beginning to read them in order and be able to follow the developments because generally speaking events from previous books might be referenced but not integral to the current book's story.  Some series, such Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, can be read in any order because main characters don't recur from book to book and thus the developments from previous books have no bearing whatsoever on later installments.  With The Graveyard Queen series it is really imperative to read them in order.  Elements in the first one set up the main stories for the second and third (especially the third) and events in the second one inform changes in Amelia's character and are referenced throughout the story in the third book.  Now pretty much everything set up in the first two books has been wrapped up in the third book, however, there's a couple elements in the third book that presumably set up the main story for the next book.

If you read the review for the first book, you know I had some reservations about the series.  Basically the most interesting and best thing about the series is the cemetery customs and traditions and history that plays a role in the book.  However, in this third book, there isn't much cemetery restoring going on and thus that part of the book is lacking.  Ultimately this series is not as expertly written or characterized as some other series might be.  But it is a quick read to read between other substantial books.

Amelia, our erstwhile cemetery restorer and ghost seer, is back in Charleston recovering from the events that took place in Asher Falls; these events have left her both physically and emotionally scarred and traumatized and have seemingly changed her.  Amelia is now reluctantly coerced into finding a dead cop's murderer by the ghost of the dead cop himself (whom we first met in the first book).  This ghost is different from the others: he manifests in a way that at first fooled Amelia into thinking he was still a live human being, and he is determined to track down his killer so that he can finally have some peace and move on.

As Amelia digs into this mystery (somewhat clumsily because she is more researcher/restorer than hardened detective) it becomes obvious to her that all roads lead to Devlin, the magnetic, charismatic detective haunted by the possessive ghost of his wife and the ghost of his daughter, who is increasingly appealing to Amelia for help.  It also appears that there is more to the deaths of Devlin's wife and daughter and that they might be linked to cop's murder, but what's the connection?

The end of the story unexpectedly reveals some heartbreaking twists to the mysteries.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Deep Down by Deborah Coates

Deep Down is the second installment in the series by Deborah Coates that features Hallie Michaels, the Afghanistan War veteran who died in an IED explosion, was resuscitated, and now sees dead people.   (See the review for the first book here.) If I'm honest with myself, I need another book series to follow like I need another hole in the head, but this one has me hook, line and sinker.  Coates does the supernatural, ghost stuff extremely well and her characterization of her heroine is vivid and full of personality.  This new book takes up about two months since the events of the last book in which some crazy, psycho dude tried to use some dark magic hoodoo stuff to control the weather (yeah, you should really read that one first and then read this one).  As this story progresses it appears that the previous events' aftermath and effects are still being felt and dealt with in this novel and may be slightly more connected to the current events detailed in this story than initially thought.

Hallie's still in South Dakota working on her family's ranch and dealing with the physical fallout from her confrontation with the aforementioned crazy, psycho dude.  But it's a couple weeks since last she's seen a ghost and nearly that long since she's had one of the blinding, debilitating headaches that often herald an encounter with the supernatural.  Unfortunately, South Dakota has become a vortex for all things supernatural, and this respite from life endangering supernatural confrontations won't last much longer.

When an elderly neighbor's son asks Hallie's father to check on his mother, Hallie's father sends her instead.  Upon Hallie's arrival she's greeted by both a pack of black dogs that stalk the edge of the neighbor's property and the rifle toting elderly neighbor, Pabby.  Pabby is surprised that Hallie can see the black dogs, whose numbers multiply every day, because it seems that only Pabby is able to see them.  Hallie knows these dogs are not of this world nor are they ghosts.  It's soon discovered that they are harbingers of death and where these dogs go, reapers soon follow.  As the story hums along it becomes apparent that these are also harbingers of the complicated consequences of the events of the previous book--because the after effects are not over and this world and the next and the boundaries that separate them have been seemingly irreparably altered to the detriment of both realms.

Hallie promises to solve Pabby's black dog problem.  Before she can turn to Boyd, the premonition dreaming sheriff's deputy ally from the previous book, she finds out that he's dealing with his own consequences, ghosts and reapers that have come out of his past in Iowa and followed him back to South Dakota to haunt him.  This is a problem for which he refuses Hallie's help and is determined to deal with on his own.  There's also the problem of people around the county vanishing into thin air.  Boyd's problem and the disappearances problem is related to the black dog problem--all of which can be traced back to the harrowing conclusion of the events in the previous novel.  That turns out not to be a conclusion at all, but rather the beginning to some very big problems that neither Hallie nor Boyd know how to solve.

This book reveals that middle of nowhere South Dakota attracts more than its fair share of ghosts, reapers, harbingers, magic, esoterica, and death.  Its residents have an unusually high occurrence of 'special talents' and 'special knowledge' unique to the supernatural world.  In fact it seems it's drawn here and to Hallie, who can see ghosts, harbingers, and reapers, and to Boyd, who dreams premonitions of death.  It's revealed that Hallie was brought back from the dead with a purpose--but for what and by whom?

Nailbiting, heartpounding suspense drips from this story from the first chapter.  Fans of the supernatural will love this book and if you haven't already read the first one, I suggest you start there before you read this one.  This book does a great job of answering some questions while raising new ones and then throwing an intriguing twist into the mix in the final chapters.  You won't be able to put this book down. And, um, when is the next one coming out?

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read

Valley of Ashes is the fourth title in Cornelia Read's Madeline Dare series.  I've reviewed the three previous titles here on the blog.  Click here and here and here to see them.  As its predecessors did before, this latest installment picks up both later in the timeline (about a year and a half after the last book) and in a different locale than each of the others because for whatever reason, Madeline and her husband, Dean, are nomads who move every couple years.  Dean is often absent from much of the action in the story due to various business travels and as a result has remained a fairly one dimensional character.  In this installment we find out why he's away so much.  And it's because he's a verbal abuse spewing asshole of a husband who doesn't care one whit to lift a finger to help his exhausted spouse with the housework or childcare instead choosing to vaunt off on hours long bike rides on the weekends that he is home and not travelling in some far off place for business.  Excuse my language, but in none of the previous novels were we given any inkling that Dean had this in him.  He either needs to get it together and shape up or Madeline needs take those twin babies and leave his ass far behind in the dust.  But I digress...

The title of Valley of Ashes has multiple meanings that I've been thinking (okay, obsessing) about since I finished the book last night.  There's the obvious reference to the cases of arson that have been popping up in the Boulder, Colorado, area, and, despite the impression that the jacket blurb gives us, do not play an integral role in the main action of the story.  The title may also refer to the state of being that Madeline and her marriage are in by the end of the novel because when I think about this I think that in the course of this story her marriage has just been torched to cinders and has burned down around her.  By the closing pages Madeline is in a very low place and not just due to her marital drama because while she thought that was the worst thing to ever happen to her, well, she finds out, sadly, that it is not.  I am still obsessing about the state of affairs in Madeline's life and where she'll be when the next book picks up (speaking of, when is that next book coming out?)

Madeline, Dean and their year old twin daughters are in Boulder for Dean's job.  Dean's on the road three out of four weeks of the month and thus 95% of the housework and childcare responsibilities fall to Madeline who is exhausted due to lack of sleep thanks to twin babies waking up at all hours of the night.  Both Dean and Madeline are exhausted, first time parents and seemingly as a result their marriage is on the edge and Dean is emotionally disconnected from Madeline.  When he is home (read when he's not travelling for work or out gallivanting on an hours long bike ride) he's prone to verbally berating Madeline for various perceived slights and shortcomings on her part.  Meanwhile, Madeline is bewildered by this change in Dean's behavior. So what sparked this 180 in Dean's temperament?  Is the pressure of achieving corporate success getting to him because he is loathe to return home to the family farm a failure as his father and brother expect him to do?  Or is there something else going on, something else that he's doing that is perhaps making him prone to these outbursts in order to make himself feel better about something that he shouldn't be doing?  (This is vague I know, but I don't want to reveal too much about this because I don't want to spoil the book.)

The story focuses on Madeline's domestic struggles as she strives to care for the twins, keep a decent home, and start a new job as a critic/journalist for a local free paper--all while virtually being a single mother.  In the background there's the mystery of a serial arsonist who keeps lighting fires across town, and Madeline, upon her hiring at the paper, is immediately and reluctantly pulled into the newspaper's coverage of the fires.  There's also the suspicion put forth by one of Dean's colleagues that the man's supervisor is doing something hinky with company property and money.  Then the latest fire, differing in m.o. from the others, claims a fatality close to both Dean and Madeline at which point the story cranks into high gear and careens off to spectacularly implode around Madeline's ears by story's end.

One thing Madeline knows for sure is that she can't trust the Boulder police to find the murderer.  One thing Madeline doesn't know is that her marriage is more on edge, hanging by a thinner thread, and threatened by a more deeply disturbed element than she realizes.  The pages in which her marriage is depicted as coming apart at the seams are some of the most visceral and gut wrenching of the entire novel.  In the end this novel isn't so much about tracking down an arsonist as it is an account of the death throes of a marriage and a family whose life as they know it will never be the same after the dust settles.

I highly recommend that you pick up this book the next time you visit the library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault

Miss Me When I'm Gone is Emily Arsenault's third novel.  Her first two were reviewed previously on the blog.  Go here and here to read about them.  Now that there are three I can see similarities--all three feature themes rooted in different areas of the literary world (there was the dictionary publisher setting in the first one, poetry appearing in a high school journal connected to a disappearance in the second, and the last manuscript and its research are the whole point of this third outing) and these last two also deal with themes of friendship and disconnection.  Neither of these latest two novels have settings as original as the first that was set in a dictionary publishing company whose stores of entries on index cards hid a decades old mystery.

After Jaime's old college friend, Gretchen, is found dead at the bottom of a treacherous, poorly maintained, concrete staircase, Jaime is asked by Gretchen's family to serve as unofficial literary executor of Gretchen's estate.  Jaime's main task is to get Gretchen's second and final manuscript in order for potential publication.  This is a task made difficult by the nature of Gretchen's process--with numerous starts and stops spread across as many notebooks and computer files.  Not to mention that Gretchen kept the exact nature of and progress of said manuscript quite close to the vest--confiding little and instead choosing to give evasive and vague descriptions of the manuscript to different people.  There is also the fact that the manuscript seemed to shift and evolve and take on a life of its own as Gretchen's research progressed.  Gretchen seemed to play her options close to her chest as she struggled to reconcile her publisher's expectations for and vision of her manuscript with her own reality as the manuscript took shape.

This is a story in which multiple threads of mystery are woven.  There's the mysterious fall that killed Gretchen that might have involved foul play or might have just been an accident or might have been connected to her work on the manuscript.  There's the puzzle that is Gretchen's manuscript--originally conceived by her publisher as a companion piece to her first memoir that would explore male country musicians, but which took off in a different direction the deeper Gretchen delved into her past.  As Gretchen gets deeper into the weeds of her research--work that takes her back to the town of her birth, to her biological mother's hometown and into the history of Gretchen's own origins.  There is the added mystery of Gretchen's own paternity wrapped up with the mystery of Gretchen's mother, Shelly's murder.  While for years the town and Gretchen's family believed the murderer to be Shelly's violent boyfriend, a man who was never convicted of the crime, there's something not quite right about the account of the night Shelly died.  But how is Gretchen's paternity connected to Shelly's murder?  And do whatever threads of these twin mysteries that Gretchen was unraveling also contain the answer to why she's dead now?

This is one of those books that's hard to put down, and it's a page turner.  The reader will piece together the bits of the various puzzles as the story goes and will probably get those pieces into place slightly ahead of Jaime.  The chapters are interspersed with excerpts from Gretchen's first memoir as well as the bits of drafts from her second manuscript.  The former slows the narrative while the latter gives insight into what Gretchen was doing in the months that led up to her death.  Ultimately, the separate mysteries are far more entangled and twisted than previously and long thought to be.  Check this book out the next time you're in the library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

The Kingdom by Amanda Stevens

The Kingdom is the second installment in Amanda Stevens' Graveyard Queen series featuring Amelia Grey, the cemetery restorer who sees dead people.  I'd like to share a few random observations about the series in general before I get to the review.  First of all, why does Amelia always end up working for sketchy, ill fated broads who belong to insular, secretive groups?  Also it's nice that Amelia's adventures don't always include being reluctantly sucked into murder investigations that bring her into ill advised contact with haunted detectives.  Between all the secrets (including those carried over from the previous book regarding Amelia's origins)--Amelia's, her parents', the town's, the townspeople's, the Ashers'--that people are keeping from each other or from Amelia (or both), well, I just want to yell so spill it already!  Because let's be honest if Amelia's parents, specifically her father, had been more forthcoming with her regarding her history, her origins and their shared ability to see ghosts, I don't think she'd get into the messes that she gets into and she wouldn't be flouting the rules he's instilled in her since childhood to protect her from the other side.  I mean, he might think he's protecting Amelia, but in this instance knowledge is power and what she doesn't know will hurt her eventually.

Asher Falls is a tiny, dying community whose inhabitants are insular, wary of outsiders and eccentric (to say the least).  This town has its secrets--submerged in the reservoir that flooded part of the town, including its cemetery, and buried in an anonymous but marked and clearly cared for grave isolated in the woods.  The flooding of parts of the town also served to isolate it and cut it off from the rest of world--back roads and a ferry are the only ways in or out--as the town slowly strangles and dies.  It is to Asher Falls that Amelia is called when she takes a contract to restore the town's cemetery, formerly a private, family graveyard, but given over to the town to use as its burying ground when the town cemetery was unceremoniously flooded forever.  The family cemetery was given as a penance by the man who signed the town's death warrant when he sold land to the state for the reservoir.  Since then the town cemetery has been left to nature--neglected and ignored--and is symbolic of the complicated tensions and resentments that roil under the surface between the town and the Asher family.

When Amelia arrives in town, she's met by odd, eccentric and unwelcoming townspeople, many of whom resent the Asher family, who still hold all the power in town, for what their greed wrought.  Amelia can't ignore the odd, supernatural incidents or the pervading sense of an ancient evil that permeates the town and the woods and that seems to originate from the nearby mountains; these strange occurrences seem to have coincided with her arrival.  Contract be damned, Amelia would hightail it out of Asher Falls and back to Charleston in a heartbeat if she thought the supernatural elements at work in the town wouldn't conspire to bring her back again.  So Amelia has no choice but to remain, to fulfill her contract, to find out why she's drawn to this town and who is buried in the unnamed grave in the woods.  What is her connection to this God forsaken place?  Why won't her parents tell her anything about her biological family of origin?  What waits for her in the woods in that grave?

The Greys as a family keep secrets--from outsiders and from each other.  They are a family whose individual members are separated by chasms of distance both emotional and physical, thus facilitating the secrets that her adoptive parents have long kept from Amelia.  This type of family dynamic is a little weird and bewildering.  Then there's the creepy town and its inhabitants, some of whom seem to have more than a passing knowledge of and interest in the arcane and supernatural.  Unfortunately in this instance while the sense of the presence of an ancient evil is referenced, its origins and why it's there is not explored.  In this installment we learn a little more about Amelia's background and again we also learn about cemetery customs, including hex signs (Pennsylvania Germans get a shout out!).

Fans of the supernatural will enjoy this book and series.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie