The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix (2020)

In the late 1990s, in a wealthy suburb of Charleston, South Carolina, a group of housewives come together to add a touch of sophistication to their lives with a book club. Five of those women find the book club to be unbearably pretentious and boring, and they decide to splinter off into their own true crime book club. Freed from reading the classics, they now get to indulge in their fascination with blood, gore, and the various predilections of serial killers.

When a charming bachelor moves into the neighborhood, the ladies greet him with their southern best and do everything they can to make him feel welcome. Almost immediately strange things begin to happen, but of course the timing of the two is dismissed as just a coincidence. How could such a nice young man be connected to anything untoward?

Then one of the women in the club is attacked and her mother-in-law involved in a horrific accident and the involvement of their new neighbor is suddenly very hard to ignore. When the rich, white ladies in the club turn their attention to the poor, black neighborhoods in the more rural parts of the county, they learn that even worse things are happening there.

What, they women ask one another, can five housewives — upstanding and well-respected Christian women — do about such ugly things? Was is really their place to cause trouble for themselves and their important husbands by casting doubt on a man now deeply entrenched in the community?

The women try to stop him and they fail.

The middle section of the book changes tone and direction and explores the many — often subtle — ways that men exert control over the women in their lives. Cowed into accepting that they have no power and no real say in what happens, the book club ebbs away as does the friendship between the women.

It will take more than three years for the horrors of what they know but are unable to stop to re-surface, this time the dangers will be too close to home to ignore.

A unique book that touches on — but never gets bogged down in — the supernatural. While campy at times, it never unravels into the pulpy sort of melodrama that can be found in stories such as True Blood. Even with the touches of horror, the novel remains foremost a story about the women and their friendship and commitment to one another.

Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts (2007)

Signs of The Seven Trilogy, Book #1

When three best friends head into the quiet Maryland woods for a tenth birthday celebration — a parent-free camping trip — they are innocent children longing for a bit of freedom. When they return to town the next day, their lives are forever changed.

The woods outside their tiny mountain town have always been rumored to be haunted — a pool where a ghost waits to drag you under, an altar once used for satanic rituals — but the boys assume that they are just stories. They are not.

The boys unknowingly stumble into a deeply powerful, deeply magical corner of the woods, and with a few innocent words, unleash a curse that will affect not only them, but their entire town.

For the seven nights following their trip to the woods, the entire town is cut off from the rest of the world and they all become possessed. They maim, murder, and torture one another and are unable to stop. On the morning of the eighth day, the town awakens from the spell and is shocked at what they find. Only the three boys remember everything that took place.

Every seven years, on the anniversary of that fateful trip into the woods, the curse revisits the town and for seven nights the townspeople sink into madness.

This year is marks the 21st anniversary of the unleashing and the three men are determined to find a way to break the curse and stop it from terrorizing the town. Unable to find the answers on how to do so on their own, they invite in a paranormal researcher and writer who might have insights to help them.

A spooky romance novel that is perfect for summer!

City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong (2016)

The Casey Butler/Rockton Series Book  #1

Casey Duncan is an extremely successful detective whose grit and intelligence has earned her the respect of her fellow cops and made her something of a star in her police department. As an Asian woman, she knows that she must work twice as hard and be three times tougher than her male counterparts and so she does just that. However composed Casey is on the surface, underneath she constantly worries that a murder she committed in her teens will catch up with her; either lead to her arrest or result in her being killed in retaliation.

Finally the waiting is over, late one night she and her lover are attacked by a man claiming to know about her past. Knowing this means the end of her career and certain danger for her friends, Casey makes a drastic decision: she will disappear from her life and attempt to hide out.

But where? Casey hears of a super-secret place, so well-hidden it is as if it does not exist; a town lost among the forests of the Canadian Yukon and offering refuge for men and women with a desperate need to hide. Casey reaches out and hears back, yes the town would be willing to offer her a place, but they would need her to come to the town to serve as a police officer.

Intrigued, Casey agrees and — with great secrecy — travels days into the north to the tiny town of Rockton: a safe harbor for the abused, wrongfully accused, hunted, and in need. Hidden amid the mountains and forests, Rockton is home to 200 people who work around the clock to carve out a life from the rugged environment.

On the surface, Rockton could seem like an Uptopia: men and women living with only the essentials, collectively building new homes, and working to care for one another as they heal and rest. Of course, if that were the case, Rockton’s police department would not have needed to recruit a police detective.

Rockton faces problems of its own making — homemade drugs, a growing prostitution problem, and high rate of alcohol-fueled assaults — as well as threats from the outside; namely vengeful, exiled members of the community who have chosen to live a very dangerous life in the woods, rather than returning South.

As Casey settles in and learns the rhythms of the town, she is shocked at how at peace she feels. Partly because she is done looking over her shoulder for her past to catch up with her, and partly because the woods offer her peace and quiet that has been missing after a lifetime in the city. Also, there is a handsome Sheriff in town that she cannot help feeling drawn to, despite his harsh temper.

Very quickly Casey realizes that there are many secrets hiding in this tiny town. Among them, the fact that wealthy criminals have bought there way into Rockton (their cash helping keep the town afloat) but whose true identities are being kept secret. Also, there has been a grisly murder in the woods near the town, a questionable suicide, and a girl’s gone missing.

Investigating these crimes is harder than Casey anticipates. Each time she gets close to solving the crimes, something derails her and things grow maddening complicated. Casey is not scared away from digging into the pasts of the residents in town to find a murderer…a murderer whose death count is rising and for whom the label “serial killer” now applies to.

A great first novel with tons of potential for the rest of the series (which is currently four books.) The town itself — with its Utopian ideals but its real world problems — poses endless avenues for exploration. I am looking forwarding to reading more about Rockton in the coming weeks.

The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs by Katherine Howe (2019)

Sequel to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane 

Ten years after her wonderful, haunting book, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,  Katherine Howe has written a sequel revealing more secret stories about the women in historian Connie Goodwin’s family. When reviewing the first installment of Connie’s story, I wrote this summary; “two interwoven stories: one of a witch on trial in Salem in 1692 and one of a modern-day historian who studies colonial America, which combine into one haunting tale filled with secrets and magic.”

Since discovering that special knowledge and abilities have been passed down matrilineally in her family for centuries, Connie’s own possession of these skills was established when she had to use her ancestors’ “recipes” (or spells) to keep herself and her boyfriend safe in the first book.

In the ten years that have passed, Connie has only revealed these talents to her mother. The further away she moves from those terrifying events, the more outrageous it seems that what happened was “magic” at all. Immersed in the hectic, stressful life of an academic with thoughts of spells and conjuring far behind her, Connie she has moved on…or so she believes.

When a visit to the ancient home that has housed her female ancestors and their magic since the 1700’s, she feels a stirring of something other-worldly. Connie reveals to her mother that her boyfriend wants to marry her but she is deeply ambivalent about such a commitment. Her mother confirms that Connie is right to be fearful; after all the women in their family live under a curse that means their beloved husbands will die horrible deaths as young men, often right after they become fathers.

Despite her mother’s insistence that she break thing off with her boyfriend, Connie refuses. Curses, she rationalizes, do not exist. Although Sam had nearly died when Connie first fell in love with him, he had recovered. She wants to ignore her mother, but the warnings of curses and deaths haunt Connie.

When mysterious things begin happening, Connie soon thinks there might, indeed, be magic stirring once again. Determined to prove to her mother and herself that the curse is not real, Connie turns to the historical record left by her mysterious female relatives.

Connie is certain that facts — wills, birth records, family trees, letters, and such — will show that the curse is not real, that men in her family can and did live long, happy lives. The opposite is proven. None of the men lived long after their wives gave birth, always to a daughter.

Her worry turns frantic when she learns she is pregnant. Now Connie must reopen the recipe books of her ancestors to try to find a spell that can undo the curse before she has a baby and seals her beloved Sam’s fate.

A great sequel overall, although it does get a bit bogged down in the beginning chapters with dull descriptions of academic bureaucracy. The tempo soon picks up and resolves into a thrilling conclusion. As with Deliverance Dane, Howe uses her professional knowledge of history to paint vivid flash-back scenes starring Connie’s  relatives, which give the story depth and levity that might otherwise be missing in a book about witches.

Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger (2016)

NOTE: This book takes place in the fictional town of The Hollows in upstate New York. Several other books by Lisa Unger also take place in The Hollows. Two of the characters in this book also appear in Unger’s “Jones Cooper” series. This book does not exactly fit into a series with these other works by the author, they are loosely connected to one another. Reading them in chronological order would be the best way to have the stories flow together, but Ink and Bone can be read alone as an independent novel.

Despite its outward appearance as an idyllic small town in the mountains of upstate New York, The Hollows has dark elements — and dangerous people — lurking just out of sight.  The town seems to exert a deep pull over some of its residents, calling them back over and over or making it hard for some to leave. Finley Montgomery is one of those people. Raised by a mother who hated The Hollows so much she had fled as a teen and hardly ever returned, Finley has known her whole life that The Hollows reached out for her, demanding she to return.

However it is not the town’s pull that finally brings the 21-year-old to live with her grandmother in The Hollows, it is Finley’s desperate need to understand and learn to control her gifts. Like her grandmother, and many of her female ancestors, Finley is a psychic with a deep connection to the dead, missing, or those in grave danger. She needs her grandmother — a world famous psychic who has helped police solve many cases — to help her learn to control how disruptive these “visitors” are, but more importantly to help teach her to interpret what they need from her so she too can help them.

In recent years, two child abduction cases have happened on the outskirts of town: the police have been unable to solve either case or definitely link the two cases together. When the mother of one of the girls taken the previous year, Merri Gleason, returns to The Hollows to seek the help of a private investigator Jones Cooper (who works with Finley’s grandmother) she sets into motion a series of events that draw in Finley into the case as well.

Soon Finley cannot keep her “visitors” out of her head and she knows without a doubt that they are trying to lead her to Merri Gleason’s missing daughter. Young and untested, Finley joins forces with the PI to investigate the disappearance of Abbey Gleason; the abduction of a young family two years prior; and man who has gone missing just that week. Although she cannot explain how, Finley knows these cases are linked and that her ghostly visitors may be able to help her solve one — or all — of them.

Finley’s instincts and the investigative skills of the PI Cooper mean that almost immediately they make some progress in finding the missing children, but the horror’s they are about to unleash might be more than they can bear.

Eerie, thrilling, and utterly unique, Ink and Bone was impossible to put down. I was simultaneously terrified and entranced by Unger’s story. She was able to take the elements of a traditional PI thriller and inject a supernatural, paranormal energy that made the story extremely compelling. I highly recommend the book…and I hope that Finley makes an appearance in Unger’s next book.

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone (2017)

In several rural parts of the earth, a simultaneous hatching of a terrifying and fast-reproducing population of spiders has been awakened from deep within the earth. These insects are capable of devouring every human in their path and of spreading across the globe with little difficultly. How will the world respond to a threat they never could have imagined?

This supernatural thriller reads like a mash-up of Dan Brown novels and the movie Contagion: covering plot lines and introducing characters on six continents in a huge array of political, military, and scientific careers who all work in concert to identify the threat and how to stop it from causing global genocide.

Told through the viewpoint of several narrators, and many other smaller characters — as disparate as the President of the United States, a Marine, a doomsday prepper, entomologist, and FBI agent — the story of the Hatching, and the subsequent effort to contain it, unfolds. The phenomenon grows unchecked in the early days of the hatching; both because no one wants to believe this is possible and because the rural areas where it began were places no one (with the power to intervene) seemed cared about. When it disaster erupts in urban cities and happens on camera, the world begins to pay attention…and to realize their disbelief has put them at a huge disadvantage. The following action shows, in great detail, how the characters respond to the threat.

Despite its great plot line, the book remained a bit underwhelming.  Characters in the story — and there are many, many characters — are presented without too much depth, the author relying mostly on the fast moving, unsettling plot. At times his female and non-white characters — who are already somewhat poorly drawn — seem to devolve into caricatures of themselves (a female scientist who is also obsessed with sex; the young African American solider who joined Marines to avoid jail; a gay prepper who takes time to make cocktails) further emphasizing the weak character development. Overall readable, but not outstanding.

 

Island of Glass by Nora Roberts (2016)

Book #3 in The Guardians trilogy. A review of Book #1 of The Guardians trilogy can be found here: http://wp.me/p6N6mT-2K  (Note: Although I read it, I did not post a review of Book 2.)

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland

 

 

Readers who follow this blog are well aware that I love Nora Roberts. After first discovering her as a teenager, I have been an unabashed fan of her work since then and I have read — although people often doubt me! — every single one of her more than two hundred and seventy-five books. Nora Roberts consistently delivers exactly what I want in a romance novel (or, in the case of her JD Robb books: a science-fiction murder-mystery) and always ties up every single storyline, just in time, with a happy ending.

All that praise aside, I have to admit that I do not like this most recent trilogy. The books have some of the elements of her books that I do love: a steamy romance between two sexy consenting adults; a great supporting cast of characters; an enviously luxurious setting; and a larger story of being on a quest — in this case, to save the world. Somehow, though, the story feels lacking in some indefinable element. After some thought, I have decided that she has written past stories that are similar to these but also better than these and, by comparison, I find The Guardians lacking. Not terrible, not unreadable…but somehow less than her supernatural-fantasy-romance best.

SPOILER ALERT: If you continue to read this post, I might spoil some secrets that are revealed in books one and two. As always, I strongly suggest that you read every book series in order! (Side note: some of this material appeared in my blog review of book #1 http://wp.me/p6N6mT-2K )

Officially classified as a romance, the book actually belongs in the sub-genre of supernatural romance, of which Roberts has written more than a few novels. The story of Stars of Fortune follows six gifted young people — Bran, Sasha, Riley, Sawyer, Doyle, and Annika — who come together to complete an epic quest searching for three priceless jewels, the Stars of Fortune, that have been hidden on earth by three goddesses from a distant world. They must learn to live, search, and fight as a team in the hopes of finding the jewels and of defeating the evil sorceress who is searching for them herself.  All six of the characters are all supernaturally gifted: Riley is a bright archaeologist and a Lycan; Sawyer is a time-traveler; Doyle is a weapons-wielding immortal; Sasha is a seer; Bran is a wizard; and Annika is a mermaid brought to the surface for a short time to help the others.

In Island of Glass, we find our heroes newly arrived at the final destination on their quest: a mansion on the coast of Ireland. Here, surrounded by sumptuous furnishings and gorgeous scenery, they begin the work of locating the last Star of Fortune. Using a combination of ancient texts, excursions to remote parts of Ireland, and magic, the team grows closer and closer to finding the Star. Along the way, they learn that a much deeper magic than simple friendship has linked them together and — of course — the final two characters, Doyle and Riley, fall in love.

Even though I do not always love supernatural and fantasy romance novels, I still have loved some of Robert’s previous books in that genre (see two suggestions below.) This time, however, things just seem super-supernatural, to the point of being silly: distant planets, hidden parallel worlds, everyone a supernatural being, everyone on a life and death quest to save the world; and there is still time for a lot of steamy sex!  Oddly, even with all that going on, there is still quite a bit of the novel dedicated to domesticity. Every time the action slows, there are discussions of who’s doing the dishes and whose turn it is to do the laundry. While I applaud Roberts’s attempt to address the issue of shared work between the men and women, at times it gets to be too much of the plot.

Those criticisms aside: Roberts’s book is populated with likable characters and her signature romantic story-arc is, as always, nice to read. The simple fact is this: she has written similar stories before that make Stars of Fortune seem less than her best.

Among the similar books that Roberts has written, there are several I would recommend in place of Stars of Fortune. If you are in search of supernatural romance, try Three Sisters Island trilogy which follows three witches who must use their powers to stop an dark, menacing presence haunting their beloved island. If you like the idea of a story about six people fated to fight evil together, a better read is the Signs of Seven trilogy which finds a group of six living and working together to defeat the ghost that infects the residents of their town every summer.  If you prefer traditional romances rather than supernatural stories, try The Reef (a stand alone novel) and The Chesapeake Bay Saga (four books told by four male narrators). Reviews of many, many of her books can be found by clicking the Tag “Nora Roberts,” on the right hand side of the main page of this website.

Find a list of all her series, including the ones I mentioned, here http://noraroberts.com/trilogies-and-series/

 

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (2011)

The Leftovers is a story with a truly fascinating plot line: several years before the book’s action one-third of the world’s population suddenly disappeared in a supernatural event that some believed to be the biblical Rapture, soon purposely re-branded by Christians as the “Sudden Departure” when they realized many of their devout had been left behind. The missing never returned, causing shock, grief and chaos around the globe with the Leftovers wondering how to put their lives back together. Existing religions have begun to crumble, the once-faithful no longer believe in their promises of salvation. In their place several alternative religious cults have emerged; the two which affect the action of the book are The Guilty Remnant (where members forgo family, wealth, even speaking and whose sole purpose to is torment those whose lives have returned to normal) and Holy Wayne movement (led by a false prophet who tells members he can hug away their pain.)

The book focuses on a few residents of a small east coast town, Mapleton, as they struggle to move forward. We meet Kevin, town mayor and father of two, whose wife Laurie has left him to join the Guilty Remnant which requires her to divorce him and never to speak with her family again. Their son Tom has run off to join to Holy Wayne movement; their daughter Jill has fallen into wild behavior and lethargy in the face of her mom and brother’s abandonment. Aimee is an orphaned teen living with Jill and Kevin — badly influencing Jill, inappropriately tempting Kevin. We also meet Meg, Laurie’s religious partner and surrogate daughter in the Guilty Remnant, and Nora, a neighbor and part-time love interest for Kevin, whose entire family disappeared during the Sudden Departure and is just now unsteadily putting her life back together. The group members all have missteps and moments of doubt as the years unspool; the religious struggling to stay committed, the left behind struggling to start new lives without the missing.

Starting out very strong, the story introduces the characters and details their internal and external struggles with the missing and the new world order the Sudden Departure has created. Sadly, the book loses momentum midway through and never regains it. The author seems to stall out, unsure what direction the characters should move; his intensity fizzles out.  The plot action slows in lieu of too much internal development of the characters: what was once well-paced action gives way to unnecessarily complicated plot lines that go nowhere or end abruptly. It feels frustrating to be forced to spend time so much getting to know the characters, only to have Perrotta dash off half-hearted endings for them.

In addition, the author’s early chapters seemed to hint that the book was going to offer some stinging criticism of religion, but that never develops. The tension between traditional religions and the cults would have been an interesting subplot, but the author keeps it as a footnote. Similarly, the development of the cult the Guilty Remnant could have focused more on the group dynamics rather than the minutiae of the cult members’ day-to-day lives and the relationship between just two members — Meg and Laurie — and so it seems like another missed opportunity.

Perhaps in the hands of a more accomplished writer, such as Stephen King, the subject could have really come to life rather than feeling like a half-hearted attempt at psychological supernatural thriller. Under the Dome stands as a much better discussion of life after an unexplained phenomenon than Leftovers.

Stars of Fortune by Nora Roberts (2015)

This novel is the first book in the new Guardians trilogy and is the most recent book released by Nora Roberts, who has written more than 200 books during her career. As a fan of her work, I have read almost all of her books and I can honestly say I enjoy all of them. While I find I love the majority of her work, some of her books just fall a bit flat for me. Stars of Fortune  — while enjoyable to read — is not destined to become a favorite of mine. That is not to say you should skip this book or that I do not recommend it for a quick, light read. Only that I feel this author offers readers other books that better allow her storytelling to shine.

Officially classified as a romance, the book actually belongs in the sub-genre of supernatural romance, of which Roberts has written more than a few novels. The story of Stars of Fortune follows six gifted young people — Bran, Sasha, Riley, Sawyer, Doyle, and Annika — who come together on the Greek island Corfu under mysterious circumstances. Three of the characters are more “traditionally” gifted: Riley is a bright archaeologist, both Sawyer and Doyle are weapons-wielding adventurers. The other three are supernaturally gifted; Sasha is a seer, Bran a wizard, and Annika a traveler from another world (although the details of Annika’s life are not laid out until the end of the book).

These six people are brought together by the Fates to search for three priceless jewels, the Stars of Fortune, that have been hidden on earth by three goddesses from a distant world. They must learn to live, search, and fight as a team in the hopes of finding the jewels and of defeating the evil sorceress who is searching for them herself. This overarching story line is told from the points of view of Sasha and Bran, between whom a romance develops, forming a second story within a story. Readers are left with the impression that Sawyer and Annika then Doyle and Riley will find love together in the subsequent books.

Although this book’s premise is slightly silly — distant planets, hidden parallel worlds, supernatural beings — Roberts book is populated with likable characters and her signature romantic story-arc is, as always, nice to read. It might be the simple fact that she has written similar stories before that make Stars of Fortune seem less than her best.

Among the similar books that Roberts has written, there are several I would recommend in place of Stars of Fortune. If you are in search of supernatural romance, try Three Sisters Island trilogy which follows three witches who must use their powers to stop an dark, menacing presence haunting their beloved island. If you like the idea of a story about six people fated to fight evil together, a better read is the Signs of Seven trilogy which finds the a group of six living and working together to defeat ghost that infects the residents of their town every summer.  If you prefer a picks that are traditional romances rather than supernatural stories, try The Reef (a stand alone novel) and The Chesapeake Bay Saga (four books).

Find a list of all her series, including the ones I mentioned, here http://noraroberts.com/trilogies-and-series/