Possession

Possession
by Kat Richardson
Recommended Ages: 15+

Seattle private eye Harper Blaine doesn't like spirit mediums, which is kind of funny, considering that she sees dead people. Nevertheless, she learns to respect one in this adventure, when they are brought together by a client whose sister has been exhibiting weird symptoms while lying in a persistent vegetative state. For example, the sister sits up in bed, grabs paints and a brush, and creates photo-realistic paintings of a place that nobody in the house can remember seeing before – yet that strikes Harper as familiar, somehow. It's like watching a marionette being controlled by a puppeteer.

Harper's investigation leads her to two more strange cases of local people who fell into persistent vegetative states around the same time, and who also seem to be calling out for help. Being a greywalker, in touch with the denizens of the Other Side and the In Between, Harper notices that there is a lot of abnormal ghost activity surrounding these people. This only adds to the weirdness of the behavior of three people whose condition, all by itself, is so rare that it shouldn't be statistically possible to find three such patients in a city the size of Seattle. Apparently, somebody, by which I mean something, is getting ready to make a big move in the gray (or rather, Grey) area between life and death, and it's probably going to mess things up for the people living (or not living) on both sides.

Meanwhile, Harper's main squeeze is having daddy issues. Quinton's dad is a super spy who has gone off the reservation, and is now trying to develop a project involving supernatural beings. While Quinton tries to sabotage whatever nefarious plot his father has in hand, Harper also receives a summons from one of her past clients, now the alpha vampire of the SeaTac metropolitan area, who is concerned about the disappearance of a, how do you say, pre-chrysalis vampire. Someone, somehow, has subverted the up-and-coming vamp's loyalty, creating a dangerous situation for the urban undead. As Harper's two lines of investigation become increasingly intertwined, she finds herself partnering not just with a genuine medium but also with a creature of the night, whom anyone would rather have as an ally than an enemy.

So, the dead and the undead of Seattle are definitely showing signs of great disturbance; and when they're disturbed, you're disturbed. Try it, and you'll agree. While Harper juggles romance, friendship, and the maintenance of a frisky pet ferret with her responsibilities as the guardian on the living side of the Grey, she must also race against the rapidly closing window of survival on three desperately imperiled victims, the swift approach of a soul-devouring evil, and whatever despicable thing her sort-of-father-in-law has planned. Plus, she has it on the authority of an immortal necromancer that simply killing the jerk won't solve anything. She's dealing with deep magic, and as the manifestations in the old part of town grow grimmer, she realizes that the world as she knows it is in deep trouble. It's the kind of challenge Harper Blaine has often risen to, and rise to it she does again, with a passion and urgency lightened by just the right amount of dry wit. Monsters take note: don't mess with this girl.

This is the eighth of nine Greywalker novels, combining private detective fiction with the paranormal. The next (and to date latest) installment is Revenant.

Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame – This sequel to that Avengers movie that killed off half of the known universe - but, coincidentally, not one member of the Avengers - brings to an end the storylines of some of the current Marvel film franchise's storied heroes, but otherwise sets everything to right. I mean, how could it not? Other, that is, than not happening at all and just leaving the observable universe, and Marvel superherodom, in the very depressing place where it was at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Which was almost depressing enough to make me decide I didn't care to watch another Marvel Cinematic Universe flick, ever. But I went to this, partly because my parents went to it after taking me out to dinner and we were traveling in their car, so I could only have avoided going it at the expense of Making a Scene. Which, at the time, just didn't seem worth the effort.

I went and saw it, but was surprised by very little that I saw. I could have predicted – and in an internal way, I kind of did predict – pretty much exactly what happens in this movie. Like I said, "How could it not?" How could time travel not be involved? How could it not be fraught with unintended consequences? How could there not be a climactic battle, starring everybody in the Screen Actors Guild who isn't under contract to DC? How could the recovery of most (but not quite all) of the heroes lost in Infinity War take place without the sacrifice of a few of those who had survived? And how could the boss battle not be depicted on a scale rivaling the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit Part 3, with all the requisite artifact of too many too-tiny CGI animated figures duking it out across a too-large canvas? How, indeed?

Sigh. I'm going to skip now to the Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Ant Man: "Somebody peed in my suit." Belly-laugh funny. (2) Capt. America, after knocking himself out in a time-travel assisted scene: "That *is* America's ass." (3) Tony Stark's moment (also via time travel) with the guy who was about to become his dad.

And now the Three Scenes That Un-Made It For Me, because I'm just too sick of this by-the-numbers crap to play nice right now: (1) The endless series of fake-out endings, stealing another unfortunate bit from the third number of a Peter Jackson/Tolkien trilogy. (2) Fat Thor. (3) Chris Pratt's character being treated as such a useless, like, prat. I haven't even seen any of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and I felt vicariously slapped in the face. I could actually go on, because there are more, but I said there were going to be three, but actually, Thing 1 and the aforementioned predictability of it all pretty much reduced my entire evening's enjoyment to a couple of belly laughs and one moment of misty-eyed emotion. If this is the current state of myth making, I want to go back to the Greek.

Die Trying

Die Trying
by Lee Child
Recommended Ages: 15+

The security cam footage will show, in one-every-10-second stills, a tall, muscular guy grabbing FBI Agent Holly Johnson as she hobbles out of her dry cleaner's with a crutch supporting her bum knee and a week's worth of laundry slung over her shoulder.

The tall guy, identified later as a recently discharged major in the Military Police with a spotless 13-year record in the U.S. Army, is obviously the ringleader of the group of thugs that kidnaps Holly and whisks her out of Chicago, leaving only a burned-out car, stolen, with its owner burned along with it in the trunk, as a clue. That and, a few days later, a dead bad guy left in a ditch several states away.
No demands have been made. For the team of Feds desperately seeking clues to Holly's fate, the list of unanswered questions is blowing up. For example, what could this G.I. Joe type – Jack Reacher is his name – possibly want? Why would a guy whose longtime commanding officer swears he would not do such a thing, do such a thing?

It's all very mysterious. I mean, it's not like they're supposed to believe that Jack Reacher just randomly happened to cross paths with Holly Johnson at the very moment she was kidnapped – that he was brought along for the ride by a bunch of not-too-bright crooks out of sheer, spur-of-the-moment desperation – and that no one could have chosen a better good guy to have Holly's back when she's surrounded by bad guys. Right?

And then it turns out that Holly is very important to someone very important. And then it turns out that Holly is very, very important to someone very, very important. And then it turns out that someone on the off-the-books, multi-agency mission to save Holly is working on the other side. And then it turns out that ... just forget about it. The surprises keep coming, hard and fast. And Jack Reacher keeps coming at their captors, even harder and faster, with a lethal efficiency that would absolutely make you cringe if you didn't think they deserved it, and that will possibly make you cringe anyway.

As I continue to learn, Lee Child writes his Reacher novels with a brutal directness that has a certain appeal. It's wish-fulfillment fantasy that works, apparently, because it's the kind of writing that fulfills its author's wishes – and he's not all that different from many of us. It's fiction that tantalizes you with the danger threatening admirable people, then rewards you with the demise of despicable people. It's fiction revolving around a hero whose inner life is not particularly logjammed with emotional conflicts.

He's a man of simple needs, wandering his country (where he has spent little time until his discharge a few months ago) with little more than the clothing on his back, staying nowhere more than a few days, troubled by few pangs of conscience (even after ending a man with his bare hands), preoccupied by a few simple desires (like the touch of a beautiful woman), and willing to, as the title suggests, "die trying" to save her, even if he can't have her.

Also, he's a man who can look at a gun and tell you everything about it in a few crisp sentences. I'm not exactly a gun nut; I can just about tell the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, if the lighting is good. But I found the edifying currents in Reacher's stream of consciousness quite enjoyable, and the highlight of the book for me – a passage that I used, successfully, to secure my dad's interest in the series – is a shooting contest between Reacher and the boss bad guy, whose agenda is so over-the-top villainous that I'm too embarrassed to describe it. Let's just say that, predictably, he dies trying something, to the great enjoyment of many, including me.

For some reason, when I read Persuader, I was persuaded that it was the first novel in the Jack Reacher series. So, when I asked the person at the library circulation desk to put the second book on request for me, I got this – which is correct. I didn't know then, nor did I know while reading this book – in fact, I only found out just now, while doing my own little bit of online research for this review – that while this really is the second book, I haven't read the first book, which is Killing Floor, and that Persuader is all the way down the list at No. 7. But as the 24th book in the series is coming out later this year, I guess I have plenty of time to catch up.

How to Catch a Bogle

How to Catch a Bogle
by Catherine Jinks
Recommended Ages: 11+

Welcome to a Dickensian underbelly of London where missing children often turn out to have been eaten by monsters known as bogles, which haunt chimneys and sewers. Here young Birdie McAdam scratches out a living as an apprentice to a veteran bogler named Alfred Bunce. Combining Birdie's tireless, tuneful voice with a quick thrust from Alfred's demon-slaying spear, the pair makes short work of these nasties.

In another era (say, that of Jonathan Stroud's "Lockwood & Co." thrillers), it would be a prestigious line of work. In Birdie's time, it's regarded as the kind of pest-removal service whose purveyors are let in by the kitchen door, sometimes known only to the servants. They are the saviors of chimney sweeps, scullery maids, and the muckers who pick through whatever washes ashore along the Thames. Who is going to listen to them when they discover that behind the latest plague of ghouls stands a respectable doctor, bent on summoning evil spirits to do his bidding? Things that crawl out of uncovered wells and sooty flues are scarcely more chilling than a human monster who sacrifices children to his own desire for power. And now, Birdie stands in his way.

Besides being a thrilling, funny and mildly romantic story – with a pickpocket on one hand and a mudlark on the other vying for Birdie's affections – it's also a nifty primer on lower-class London slang (there's even a glossary at the back) and a vivid picture of 19th century English urban life, only with scaly critters added. It plumbs such dark spaces of the imagination as being locked up in a lunatic asylum, being dangled as bait in front of a child-eating horror, and being squeezed into a starchy dress by a prim lady who wants you to grow up nice and proper. Imagine being given the choice between them. Also, the lyrics of the songs that Birdie sings are hysterical.

This book, a.k.a. A Very Unusual Pursuit, is the first book of the City of Orphans series. It continues in A Plague of Bogles (a.k.a. A Very Peculiar Plague) and The Last Bogler (a.k.a A Very Singular Guild). Catherine Jinks is the Australian-Canadian author of the four-book Pagan Chronicles, the Allie's Ghost Hunters quartet, the Cadel Piggott/Evil Genius trilogy, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group and loads of other titles for teens and younger.

Full Wolf Moon

Full Wolf Moon
by Lincoln Child
Recommended Ages: 14+

When Yale medieval history prof Jeremy Logan tries to take a break from his second career as an “enigmalogist” – explainer of the unexplained – he finds himself at an artists’ retreat in the Adirondacks, working on a scholarly monograph about heresy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of things that go bump in the night – or, in this case, things that howl at the full moon – comes to him, in the form of an old college chum who now works as a park ranger.

Randall Jessup suspects that the mauled victims found in the woods after the last couple of full moons are the doing of something with the intelligence of a man and the savagery of a wild animal. Logan isn’t quite so ready to sign onto the werewolf theory, but when his friend becomes the next victim, it gets harder to look away.

Risking getting kicked out of the quiet sanctuary of Cloudwater, Logan finds himself circling the edges of a police manhunt that may have something more than man out in front of it. Could the killer be a psychopathic killer who was recently discharged from a criminally insane ward into the very area of the murders? Could he have something to do with an inbred clan that lives behind a woven wall in the backwoods, and whom the locals suspect of having a hairy secret? Could it be related to a research station conducting secret animal experiments on the fringes of science? Or maybe all of the above?

Whatever the truth is, it will (naturally) put Logan and others in terrifying danger on a series of full-moon nights – because monographs aren’t written in a day, you know – amid the gorgeous scenery and, in the dark at least, unnerving quietness of upstate New York’s parkland. Secrets within secrets, moon sickness, paranoia, isolation and anger all do their part to make a stretch of forest road a deadly place to be while one guy, no stranger to being dismissed as a fringe maven, strives to reconcile the unbelievable with the undeniable, the fantastic with the real. It all cooks up into a rich stew of eeriness, weirdness, suspense, freakish terror, outlandish outlines and (more or less) believable details.

This is Book 5 of the Dr. Jeremy Logan series, coming after Deep Storm, Terminal Freeze, The Third Gate and The Forgotten Room. The author, not to be confused with Lee Child, is half of the "Preston & Child" writing duo, along with Douglas Preston. Together, they have written the 18-book Pendergast series and the five-book Gideon's Crew series, besides a handful of stand-alone books. By himself, Lincoln Child is also the author of Utopia (a.k.a. Lethal Velocity) and Death Match.

The Forgotten Room

The Forgotten Room
by Lincoln Child
Recommended Ages: 14+

Dr. Jeremy Logan is a professor of medieval history at Yale, but most people know him from his highly publicized sideline, in which he styles himself an “enigmalogist.” That’s where he travels the world, separating truth from superstition and getting to the truth behind legends and lore. The Loch Ness monster? Check. Bigfoot? Vampires? Werewolves? Abominable snowmen? If they’re really out there, he knows about it first-hand.

But now, he has been asked back to Lux, an elite policy institute tucked away on the Rhode Island seashore, where he was briefly a research fellow years ago, until another faculty member had him kicked out for lacking scientific rigor. In spite of their reservations about his field of interest, the fellows at Lux need Logan now. They need someone they can trust to be discreet, someone with an open mind, someone with the skills to explain the unexplainable.

Why? Because one of their most sensible, even-tempered fellows recently lost his mind, attacked another staff member, then committed suicide in a very gruesome way. Several other faculty members have experienced strange and ominous phenomena. It all seems to date back to the re-opening of the long closed west wing of the Lux building, originally the home of an eccentric millionaire whose family had a history of tragic happenings. Could the place be haunted? Could it have something to do with a room that Logan discovers on the second floor of the west wing, a room not on the official blueprints?

Logan digs deeper, because that’s what he does. Inside that room – which has no apparent way in or out – is a mysterious device built during a project that was abandoned decades ago. Files relating to the project are missing from Lux’s archives. Anyone who learns what it was about seems to fall victim to a tragic accident. The more Logan closes in on the secret, the more dark, diabolical and deadly things happen in and around Lux until a literal and figurative hurricane of violence comes ashore.

Paranormal or not, this book is unmistakably a thriller. Part of its edginess, though, comes from how long it takes to spot whether it's paranormal or not. The truth is so chilling that the initial hypothesis – killer ghosts – might actually be tame by comparison. And while Logan isn't exactly a take-no-prisoners action hero – he is, after all, a history prof who talks to his dead wife when no one else is around – his persistence in getting to the bottom of things is bound to get him into the kind of trouble that kept this reader, for one, hanging on with a white-knuckled grip, straight through the night.

This is Book 4 of the Dr. Jeremy Logan series, which also includes Deep Storm, Terminal Freeze, The Third Gate and Full Wolf Moon. The author, not to be confused with Lee Child, is half of the "Preston & Child" writing duo, along with Douglas Preston. Together, they have written the 18-book Pendergast series and the five-book Gideon's Crew series, besides a handful of stand-alone books. By himself, Lincoln Child is also the author of Utopia (a.k.a. Lethal Velocity) and Death Match.

The Boy Who Knew Everything

The Boy Who Knew Everything
by Victoria Forester
Recommended Ages: 12+

In this sequel to The Girl Who Could Fly, buoyant Piper McCloud has led her little band of misfits back to the farm where she started life, after their escape from an awful institution devoted to squashing the super-powers out of very special kids. Serving as co-leader of the group is Conrad Harrington III, a super-brilliant boy who feels the life go out of him when he realizes that his father, who rejects his very existence, is about to become President of the U.S. But he doesn't have long to mope, with a series of disasters threatening thousands of lives and the government doing less than nothing about it.

Before they get to the bottom of what is happening, Piper and Conrad must escape from a military that blames them for everything that is going wrong. They must find their way into a hidden world full of people like them and then, in defiance of even greater odds, out again. They must make peace with terrifying enemies who have become allies; and more difficult still, they must survive the betrayal of a seeming friend who is really their ultimate enemy.

That synopsis comes dangerously close to revealing too much. But really, all I want to add to this review is that it's a pretty good book, with some emotionally powerful moments, amazing feats and high adventure; but it doesn't move me quite as much as the first book did. I suppose this could partly be put down to middle-book-of-a-trilogy-itis. Part of it, however, is directly related to the ending being (I feel) rushed, with the pace of the story surging ahead more than I thought was really good for it. Nevertheless, I am very interested in seeing the third installment, The Boy Who Lived Forever (scheduled for release in January 2020). I expect a great deal, even after a not-quite-as-good second book, of the conclusion of a trilogy that started as strongly as this one did.