Tag: historical mystery

Blog Tour/Review: The Thirteenth Gate by Kat Ross

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I’m thrilled to be one of the hosts for today’s stop on the blog tour for The Thirteenth Gate by Kat Ross, Book 2 in her exciting Dominion Mystery series.  You can read my review below.  To check out the other great bloggers on the tour and see what they thought, click here.

WinPlus there’s a giveaway (US & Canada only, sorry!) with a chance for one lucky person to win a signed paperback copy of Book #1 in the Dominion Mystery series, The Daemoniac.

To enter click here.

 

TheThirteenthGateAbout the Book

Winter 1888. At an asylum in the English countryside, a man suspected of being Jack the Ripper kills an orderly and flees into the rain-soaked night. His distraught keepers summon the Lady Vivienne Cumberland – who’s interviewed their patient and isn’t sure he’s a man at all. An enigmatic woman who guards her own secrets closely, Lady Vivienne knows a creature from the underworld when she sees one. And he’s the most dangerous she’s ever encountered. As Jack rampages through London, Lady Vivienne begins to suspect what he’s searching for. And if he finds it, the doors to purgatory will be thrown wide open…

Across the Atlantic, an archaeologist is brutally murdered after a Christmas Eve gala at the American Museum of Natural History. Certain peculiar aspects of the crime attract the interest of the Society for Psychical Research and its newest investigator, Harrison Fearing Pell. Is Dr. Sabelline’s death related to his recent dig in Alexandria? Or is the motive something darker? As Harry uncovers troubling connections to a serial murder case she’d believed was definitively solved, two mysteries converge amid the grit and glamour of Gilded Age New York. Harry and Lady Vivienne must join forces to stop an ancient evil. The key is something called the Thirteenth Gate. But where is it? And more importantly, who will find it first?

Format: ebook Publisher: Acorn Publishing Pages: 350
Publication: 26th Jun 2017 Genre: Historical Mystery, YA    

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Barnes & Noble ǀ Kobo ǀ iTunes
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

 Find The Thirteenth Gate on Goodreads

 

My Review

‘In the universe…there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.’

What do you get if you take an intricately plotted, suspenseful historical mystery set in 19th century London and New York and add ghouls and daemons? An enthralling, wonderfully entertaining read, that’s what! I’m not much into paranormal or fantasy but I really enjoyed this book because the fantasy elements were subtly woven into a satisfyingly complex historical mystery.

Lady Vivienne makes a feisty, idiosyncratic and resourceful heroine alongside her companion, Alec Lawrence. Their bond is symbiotic in nature, forged and developed over a great expanse of time with each contributing skills and abilities that make them an effective fighting force against the powers of evil. As Lady Vivienne explains, ‘We are the light against the darkness’.

Harrison (Harry) Pell and her friend, John Weston, specialise much more in solving the crimes of this world – think Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but of course they were only fictional, weren’t they? However, in The Thirteenth Gate, Harry and John are forced to confront malefactors from a distinctly more shadowy realm.  When Lady Vivienne, Alec, Harry and John join forces, nothing can stop them – or can it?

This is the second book in the series. (Click here to download Book #1, The Daemoniac, which is currently free from Amazon.)  Although there are lots of references to earlier events in The Thirteenth Gate, this didn’t affect my enjoyment and the book works perfectly well as a standalone. Except….that having read this you’re definitely going to want to read the first one (I certainly do), so why not start there? In fact, as the author explains in her afterword, the story of Lady Vivienne and Alec starts much further back than that, in The Fourth Element trilogy.  Book #1 of the trilogy, The Midnight Sea, is currently free to download from Amazon – click here to get hooked.

I received a review copy courtesy of the author and Xpresso Book Tours in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Compelling, suspenseful, imaginative

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAbout the Author

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats. Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014) about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.

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Book Review: The Virgin of the Wind Rose by Glen Craney

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VirginoftheWindRoseAbout the Book

While investigating the murder of an American missionary in Ethiopia, rookie State Department lawyer Jaqueline Quartermane stumbles upon the infamous Templar Word Square, an ancient Latin puzzle that has eluded scholars for centuries. To her horror, she soon discovers the palindrome has been embedded with a cryptographic time bomb. Separated by half a millennium, two global conspiracies dovetail in this historical mystery-thriller to expose the world’s most explosive secret: the real identity and mission of Christopher Columbus.

Purchase Links*
 Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Barnes & Noble ǀ iTunes ǀ Kobo
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Virgin of the Wind Rose on Goodreads

My Review

Part The Da Vinci Code, part Raiders of the Lost Ark this is a densely-plotted historical mystery. In fact, at times, it made this reader feel a bit dense as I struggled to keep up with the twists and turns of the intricate plot. This is a book that will demand all your concentration but repay that investment if you love a historical mystery that’s like a richly embroidered tapestry.

Alternating between the present day and 15th century Portugal (and beyond), each story has a distinctive style that means there’s no confusion with the frequent time shifts. However, this does mean that, at times, it felt a little like two different books melded together.

I really loved the story set in 15th century Portugal focused on Pero da Covilha who as a young man is inducted into the secret Knights of the Order of Christ, established by Henry the Navigator (known as the Old Man). After undergoing rigorous initiation tests, Pero and his comrades, Dias and Zarco, receive intensive tuition in cosmology and navigation by the stars and winds. The story is rich in historical detail and brought convincingly to life with walk-on parts for real historical figures such as Torquemada, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and Vasco da Gama. [The book is subtitled A Christopher Columbus Mystery but readers should be aware this character doesn’t appear until around two thirds of the way through the book.] Pero longs to go to sea like his comrades but is destined to remain on land using his facility with languages to fulfil secret missions for the Old Man. Although these missions will part him from his homeland, his friends and the love of his life, they will also involve him in one of the most momentous undertakings in history.

The story set in the present day is an archetypal conspiracy thriller that whisks you around the globe from Washington D.C. to Ethiopia, France, Nova Scotia, Ireland, Scotland, Rome and beyond as our protagonist, Jaqueline, tries to unravel the mystery. There are the obligatory action scenes, lucky escapes and fortuitous coincidences plus a name check for the participants in just about every historical conspiracy theory you can think of: the Knights Templar, the Masons, Prester John, the location of the Ark of the Covenant, and so on. [Self-deprecatingly the author references Umberto Eco’s ‘idiot test’ from Foucault’s Pendulum: ‘The lunatic is easily recognised.  Sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.’]

I admit I struggled to engage with Jaq as a character and found her extreme form of Biblical literalism and the whole End of Days stuff tied to a Muslim jihad a bit hard going. I’ll be honest as well and say I lost my way a few times with the cryptography elements. The conclusion of the book felt a little rushed but hats off to the author for the quite devastating ending.

The Virgin of the Wind Rose is clearly the product of a massive amount of research and if you love puzzles and cryptograms, like your historical mysteries rich in detail and complex in plot, then you will love this book.

I received a review copy courtesy of the author and chose to give an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Well-researched, intricate, action-packed

Try something similar…Sanctus by Simon Toyne

GlenCraneyAbout the Author

Glen Craney is a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and lawyer. The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences awarded him the Nicholl Fellowship prize for best new screenwriting. He is also a two-time indieBRAG Medallion Honoree, a Chaucer Award First-Place Winner for Historical Fiction set during the Middle Ages, and has three times been named a Foreword Reviews Book-of-the-Year Award Finalist. His debut novel, The Fire and the Light, was recognized as Best New Fiction by the National Indie Excellence Awards and as an Honourable Mention winner for Foreword’s BOTYA in historical fiction. His novels have taken readers to Occitania during the Albigensian Crusade, to the Scotland of Robert Bruce, to Portugal during the Age of Discovery, to the trenches of France during World War I, and to the American Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. He lives in southern California.

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