Author: Andrew Klavan

Publisher: Turner

Confession: I love spoilers. Ok, maybe that is not entirely true. But I don’t always mind knowing how a story ends, or what happens in the meantime. It does ruin just about any book-to-film I see (as they never get the story right). But, I like knowing stories because I love stories. That I said, I didn’t mean to ruin the story when I began this book. When this trilogy first came out, it was in dramatized audio format. And it was good. I was hooked from the start. Unfortunately, I jumped in on the story a little more than halfway through. Whoops. So finally, years after it was published and I first listened to it, I got around to reading the start of the story.

Even knowing how the story ends, I enjoyed reading it “again.” As I missed the beginning, and I’d forgotten some details, I was still able to enjoy this first book of the trilogy on its own. Klavan is a good writer. His style reminds me of Jim Butcher and the Dresden Files. That’s about as close to this book’s genre as you can get. It is something like true crime-fantasy-allegory-realism. It’s good, it’s gritty, and it grips you from one page to the next.

Klavan engages his readers well. As I am assuming you don’t like spoilers, I’ll try not to spoil anything for you. But if the name and the cover image don’t provide enough hints, there is a transition that happens in the story just frequently enough that you’ll simply have to read the next section. Or chapter. Or a series of chapters and, whoops, you finished the book!

Now this book is not for everyone. Klavan does not sanitize his character’s speech, nor the details of death and crime. There are some scenes that are…unpleasant to read, to say the least. But they do not take away from the nature of the book. Like the world we live in and the one he is portraying, Klavan narrates as things really are, sometimes in a way that is more real than what we experience. Sometimes this comes across in dialogue; sometimes it is in the symbolic symmetry. The entire story is engaging, enlightening, real.

If you like true crime, fantasy, or any story that pulls you from one chapter to the end, this is the book (and likely series) for you.

Blessings to you and yours,

~Madelyn Rose Craig