Maddie is hiding. She spends most of her life hiding,
after her abusive relationship was finally ended when her disturbing power went
terribly out of control.
But now she’s being haunted – well, maybe, the ghost
claims he’s still alive and he needs Maddie’s help – if she will just leave the
house. Eventually forced when her own family becomes a target, Maddie has to
confront her powers, rebuild her sense of self and find her courage in the
outside world to save the lives of kidnapped children, including her own
nephew.
But that outside world is more complex than she ever
imagined – and Jon himself, the very very real ghost – definitely complicates
matters and Maddie’s wounded feelings.
I am going to struggle not to “not bad” this book to
death.
What do I mean by that? Well, take the romance. The
romance is apparent almost from the very beginning of this book. Maddie and Jon
see each other and there’s instant chemistry – which isn’t bad, even if it is
rather overwhelming – which is heavily spiced with lots of describing how
attractive the other is – but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as it is in other
books.
By the end of the book, the two are madly in love etc
etc. They’ve known each other for about a week. A week and they now cannot live
without each other. A week in which they’ve never really spent any true social
time, concentrating entirely on the mission. They are, effectively, strangers
but at least the true love forever doesn’t hit until the end of the book. Jon
tries to seduce a woman for information on kidnapped children as he has done
dozens of times before and Maddie gets jealous for no reason – but her snappiness
over it doesn’t last and she quickly gets over it (especially when he reveals
he just couldn’t do it because he can’t stop thinking of Maddie – ugh). Jon is
ridiculously protective of Maddie – but it stems from her own inexperience and
vulnerability that isn’t entirely unreasonable and she fights against it
repeatedly. Jon tries to drive her away for her “own good”, but at least his
behaviour was limited to distancing himself from her rather than active
cruelty. She’s struggling to control her powers and learns under his guidance –
but at least part of that growth comes from her own emerging confidence and
strength
And this really sums up the book. We hit a lot of the old
tropes, a lot of tropes that are either tired or problematic or both – but all
of them are handled as well as it is possible to handle them. It sounds like
terrible praise but my constant refrain is “this could have been so much
worse.” That doesn’t sound like a compliment – but it is. These tropes and
clichés were handled, if not necessarily well (I don’t think anything could
make me like them) then at least with a careful restraint to prevent them truly
destroying the book or at least making the story more irritating.
There are also some very good elements – including some
very good commentary on domestic abuse. Maddie has an abusive past – physical
and emotional (this does feed the trope of a woman with little or no sexual
experience and what experience she has is truly awful). She has been left with
a lot of fear, a lot of doubt and very little confidence due to the scars left
by it as well as the doubt she faces due to the steps she took to protect
herself – people both don’t understand her fear and judge or pity her for it.
But her sister as well serves as an equal example of emotional abuse; even in a
non-violent relationship it’s still clearly abuse as her sister is forced to
change her behaviour and often live in fear of her husband finding things out.
The depiction of how the experience can affect you is
very strong but is also coupled with Maddie’s evolution as a character. She
isn’t saved by the love of a big strong man – she grows stronger through the
need to step up to rescue her nephew. She becomes stronger and more confident
because she needs to save the day, because there’s an innocent life relying on
her and because she cannot sit back and leave it to others who may fail without
her skills. She finds her own courage and her own confidence; it is not conjured
in the magic of true luuuurve which I really appreciated.
The story itself is a decent… investigation in a classic
Urban Fantasy sense. That means absolutely no investigation, just relying on
woo-woo to identify the bad guys and then a fair amount of tension, drama and
action as the two sides circle each other, fight, escape, evade, search, fight
some more. It’s not a procedural or an investigation by any stretch – but the
story doesn’t bog down or break without either character actually doing
anything to find the children. They keep moving, they keep working, they keep
fighting; perhaps a lot happens over the course of a week, but it feels neither
rushed nor slow.
The side issues in the book are handled really well as
well; Maddie’s growth, her history, the romance, Jon’s angst, the world
building – none of it is allowed to occupy so much space that it pushes the
core story – finding and saving children – out of the picture. The priority is
constantly maintained – as it should be (it’s terribly hard to see protagonists
as good guys when they decide to take time out for hot sex when there are kids
waiting to be rescued).
The big bad is that most evil of things – a terribad
sexual woman and there are no memorable minorities of any stripe that come to
mind. This isn’t a book for inclusion, alas.
So where does that leave me? It leaves me with a review
that seems to be full of apologetics, listing things I didn’t like about a book
then trying to counter it constantly with an “it’s not that bad.” Which is true
– but somehow manages to sound more condemning than if I’d cussed it out from
the first paragraph. But it is a good book, it’s a solid book – is it pinnacle
of the genre? No. Does it have a whole lot of tropes? Yes. But they’re done in
the best way possible, nothing is truly vexing and the whole book is actually
kind of fun to read. More, it’s a very solid introduction – and very clearly
the first book in a series. If you didn’t know the world (and it shares the
same world as the Nikki and Michaelseries) it lays a solid ground work for it. We’re introduced to Jon and Maddie,
we know their histories, their basic personalities and all with a decent story
to keep the book interesting. We’re now set to go anywhere with these
characters – on that score, the book did an excellent job
