The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride’s party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord’s mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.

As Chih and the bride-to-be explore empty rooms and desolate courtyards, they are drawn into the mystery of what became of Lord Guo’s previous wives and the dark history of Do Cao itself. But as the wedding night draws to its close, Chih will learn at their peril that not all monsters are to be found in the shadows; some monsters hide in plain sight.

Though all the novellas are standalone, I would recommend reading at least one or two earlier ones to get a feel for the world and more information on the background of Chih and Almost Brilliant.

Dear Nghi Vo,

A new Singing Hills novella with Cleric Chih! This time it’s got some weird goings on, a strange family, a mystery. But where is Almost Brilliant?

Cleric Chih, a story gatherer from the Singing Hills Monastery, is on the road, traveling with a young bride and her parents on her way to meet a man her parents want her to marry. Pham Nhung is very young, sweetly charming, and acts and is treated as if she’s more fragile than fine porcelain. When the retinue reaches the compound, Nhung takes Chih with her ahead of the rest and surveys the strong walls that surround it, wondering aloud if she will find her future here.

The events get weirder after that when a bizarre young man warns Chih to have Nhung ask the lord what happened to his other brides. Wandering around the grounds that night, Chih and Nhung enter several buildings with Nhung coyly asking Chih to go in first and check for monsters. The mystery of the place deepens when the lord’s son, the young man from earlier, warns Chih and reveals something awful about his situation there and old family secrets. But the monsters Chih is expecting aren’t the ones they find.

“The world starts with a story. So do dynasties and eras and wars. So does love, and so does revenge. Everything starts with a story.”

Once again, a perfectly paced story unfolds in novella format. Some novellas end up too rushed or too thinly written with not enough to keep me interested. With the Singing Hills stories, I know that this won’t be the case. Words are carefully used to create and shade in the background worldbuilding which is filled with characters given nutshell sketches that tell us all we need to know about who they are without wasting pages on unneeded information.

The terrible situation is slowly built up, little by little with an aftertaste of unease, like a fire started and then allowed to heat up before bursting out in raging flames. There are subtle clues but they are softly dropped into the story and the reader is allowed to notice them and ponder what they mean before all the plot points are tied together and everything is let loose.

What didn’t work quite as well for me is

~Jayne

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Dear Paulette Kennedy:

This book was described as incorporating elements of “surrealism, history, mystery and romance” and being for fans of “Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier and historical fiction.” I was intrigued, even though the story didn’t necessarily sound like something I’d usually read.

The story begins with this provocative first line:

September 1955

The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices.

Loretta Davenport is a 27-year-old housewife and mother living in a town in the Missouri Ozarks (the fictional town is apparently based on Springfield, Missouri). As the book opens she is suffering from an unspecified flu-like illness that leaves her bedbound and depleted for several days, on the edge of delirium. She foggily worries about her husband Pete and his ability to manage the household and their two young children, Lucas and Charlotte. On the third day she rises shakily and tries to resume her normal life, but she almost immediately suffers an attack that has her falling to the floor and waking up outside in the backyard, with no idea of how she got there. Loretta also suffers a disturbing vision of being buried alive before losing consciousness.

A local girl, Darcy Hayes, has gone missing, and Loretta comes to believe that she is having visions of what happened to her. After Loretta calls in an anonymous tip to the police department, Darcy’s body is found right where she envisioned that it would be. Loretta asks Pete, who is a professor at a local Christian college, if he thinks she may be having prophetic visions, but he denies the possibility and warns her against demonic influences.

Loretta met Pete when she was 16, four years after she was involved in a car crash that killed her mother. She dropped out of high school when they married, and since then she has lived a constricted life as the wife of a man who dismisses her as a person and seems to care more about her being the appropriate testament to his domestic order. Loretta is already rebelling in small ways – she is hiding money in the house, not so much with the idea that she’ll use it to leave Pete (at least not at first) but so she can have a tiny bit of agency. She also impulsively takes her children trick-or-treating on Halloween, something Pete has previously deemed ungodly.

Loretta and Pete’s marriage is strained by his demands and negging, her previous experience with post-partum depression (she secretly uses a diaphragm, not wanting to go through pregnancy again) and his sporadic alcohol binges.

Loretta grows more rebellious after attending a lecture by a local parapsychologist, Dr. Curtis Hansen. She begins to have secret sessions with Dr. Hansen, in which she reveals the visions that have begun to distract and at times terrify her. She has visits from her dead mother, which she finds comforting. But other visitors who seem to want her to do something (sort of ala The Sixth Sense) trouble her, and when her daughter Charlotte mentions a lady who visits her at night and stands at the end of her bed, Loretta worries that they are being haunted by a malevolent presence.

Darcy Hayes’ sister asks for Loretta’s help in finding Darcy’s killer, and a trip to the police station leads to Loretta’s gifts being dismissed by the lead detective. But another detective approaches her in the parking lot about a cold case – a local girl who went missing and was never found. It turns out that this detective has ties to Dr. Hansen, and Loretta soon discovers more “gifts” – she is able to tell things about people if she holds objects that those people have owned, an ability called psychometry. (She also experiences involuntary telekinetic fits when angry – these scare her as she’s worried about hurting her children accidentally.)

All of these abilities can be traced back to the illness Loretta suffered, though she apparently had some fledgling experience with premonitions when she was younger – she suffers from guilt over her mother’s death because she had a bad feeling all that day, but didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from.

There is a lot going on in The Devil and Mrs. Davenport – there is a strong central storyline having to do with Loretta coming into her own, and butting up against the sexism of the era and of her controlling husband. In one scene she tries to open a secret bank account – she’s been making some money writing for the Kansas City Star – and is told that she can’t open an account without her husband present. She’s also dealing with past traumas, chiefly the death of her mother. Loretta’s relationship with Pete deteriorates throughout the course of the novel, and the Davenport home is crumbling literally, not just metaphorically – cracks appear in the foundation and a leak causes the bathtub to fall into the kitchen below.

There’s the mystery of Darcy’s murder and the other girl’s disappearance, as well as a girl named Joan who Loretta has premonitions of danger about. I wasn’t sure how (or if) the disparate mysteries were related, though I assumed there would be some personal connection for Loretta. As such I was suspicious of the two male leads, Pete Davenport and Dr. Curtis Hansen, though I don’t know that I was supposed to be suspicious of both of them.

On top of these two elements there’s the paranormal aspect. I hesitate to call this the weakest part of the novel, because it did serve as a way for Loretta to come into her own – her abilities gave her a sense of self-worth that had been lacking for a long time. I appreciated them as a metaphor but when Dr. Hansen talked about the phenomena as if they have scientific validity, I didn’t like it. I couldn’t reconcile my real-world beliefs with something that feels not just not real, but like a hoax, a scam. So there’s that – it didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book but it was a negative for me.

The story gets increasingly gothic and nightmarish, and Loretta has to find the courage to confront the truth and vanquish an enemy, for her own sake and for her children. The ending was fine but the epilogues piled on heavy with an HEA that didn’t work for me.

I am a little ambivalent (as usual) on a grade – Loretta was a strong heroine, and the good elements were probably A-. The things I didn’t like were maybe C+, making an average grade of B. But I’d recommend this to readers who like the 1950s setting or simply are in the mood for a little something different.

Best,

Jennie

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For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all…even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.

A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we’ve come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world.

Given how much I enjoy sturm und drang and good old melodrama, I am always surprised that I don’t like gothic novels more, and that Southern gothic novels, specifically, often irritate me. Gothics can feel so self-conscious and self-referential, and adding the Southern atmosphere amps up those qualities. It’s all just too much for me, usually from the start. (It doesn’t help that the typical gothic heroine is relentlessly insipid.)

This novel layers the Southern gothic atmosphere on from the first scene: our protagonist, Ruth, is part of a group of townspeople gathered to hear the sheriff declare the discovery of a human skull that shows signs of violence. There are murmurings about the Low Man (a local mythical boogeyman) and dark happenings, and attention turns to Ruth’s father, the town preacher, who seems to hold more power over the residents of Bottom Springs than any of the other men of standing in the community. He manages to whip everyone up with a rousing speech about demons walking amongst them and Christ’s deliverance.

The story is told in alternating timelines: the present, when Ruth is about 23 and the past, starting when Ruth is 17. I usually enjoy alternating timelines, but this one got confusing for me – Ruth has Dark Secrets that she keeps from her best friend Everett and I found it hard to keep track of just what secrets Ruth was keeping and when she started keeping them.

Teenaged Ruth is extremely shy and quiet, the only child of ultra-strict parents who are central casting archetypes: Preacher and Preacher’s Wife. She has a rebellious streak (well, duh) but it’s pretty well hidden. When she begins to receive attention from an older itinerant worker, Renard, Ruth’s romantic dreams (fueled by her reading of forbidden books, such as Twilight) take flight. But a secret meeting with Renard (in the swamp, the most romantic of rendezvous locations) ends very badly. Which leads to present-day Ruth thinking she knows who that skull might belong to.

The bad date with Renard also leads Ruth to a fast and intense friendship with Everett, who she previously knew simply as the town weirdo. Everett is the son of an alcoholic father; they are poor and Ever is what passes for a goth outcast in Bottom Springs. Ever teaches Ruth about the natural world around her and the wonders of the swamp (!) and on one memorable occasion sucks snake venom out of her inner thigh, which both turns Ruth on and maybe saves her life? I don’t know. Ruth’s terrible parents are disapproving of the relationship but don’t forbid it outright (not believably, given the control they have over Ruth).

From there the book gets kind of crazy with drug-dealing motorcycle gangs, secret occult groups and some vigilante shit that made me uncomfortable. Both Ruth and Ever have secrets, and also neither seem to realize or at least acknowledge the sexual tension between them for YEARS, for reasons that were unclear.

Ruth gets a condescending boyfriend in the form of a sheriff’s deputy. She continues to kowtow to her parents and doesn’t just skip Bottom Springs like she wants to at 18. This made no sense to me and honestly kind of infuriated me, though it was finally explained as being related to her Dark Secret.

As mentioned, the Southern atmosphere is ladled on heavily, with references to colorful local characters: “…Hardy Tullis-you know, that crazy fella that tries to wrestle gators?” and “Old Man Jonas” and a lower-class cadre of actual fishwives, whose husbands are employed by the major business in the area. None of it feels realistic. Nor do the main characters – while the protagonists of the author’s previous books In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and The Last Housewife where flawed but sympathetic, Ruth and Ever feel too much like a collection of cliches to ever come alive. To the degree that Ruth felt real to me, I found myself irritated with her for her unwillingness to just cut her parents off, already. When she finally does, it’s a overcorrection that leads to tragedy.

Speaking of which, the denouement features an actual lynch mob, Ruth doing very stupid things that somehow work out as planned, and an ending I really wasn’t thrilled with.

BIG SPOILER

I rarely give actual bad grades to suspense books, mostly because they tend to hold my attention and I value that highly when grading. Maybe I’ve just read enough of them now that that doesn’t count for as much, or maybe I was just too annoyed with the aspects of Midnight is the Darkest Hour that annoyed me. I’m giving it a D.

Best,
Jennie

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Set in 1960s Italy, this stylish, atmospheric debut spins a bewitching web of ruthless ambition, family secrets, and the consequences of forbidden love, as an ambitious American actress snags the starring role in a mysterious horror movie shooting on location in a crumbling medieval castle outside Rome…
Readers who enjoy the moody gothic allure of Kate Morton and Silvia Moreno-Garcia or the immersive settings of Lucinda Riley and Fiona Davis will be enthralled by Kelsey James’ spellbinding web of intriguing mystery, family secrets, forbidden love, and midcentury Italian flair.

Rome, 1965: Aspiring actress Silvia Whitford arrives at Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios from Los Angeles, ready for her big break and a taste of la dolce vita. Instead, she learns that the movie in which she was cast has been canceled. Desperate for money, Silvia has only one choice: seek out the Italian aunt she has never met.

Gabriella Conti lives in a crumbling castello on the edge of a volcanic lake. Silvia’s mother refuses to explain the rift that drove the sisters apart, but Silvia is fascinated by Gabriella, a once-famous actress who still radiates charisma. And the eerie castle inspires Silvia’s second chance when it becomes the location for a new horror movie, aptly named The Revenge of the Lake Witch—and she lands a starring role.

Silvia immerses herself in the part of an ingenue tormented by the ghost of her beautiful, seductive ancestor. But when Gabriella abruptly vanishes, the movie’s make-believe terrors seep into reality. No one else on set seems to share Silvia’s suspicions. Yet as she delves into Gabriella’s disappearance, she triggers a chain of events that illuminate dark secrets in the past—and a growing menace in the present . . .

Dear Ms. James,

It’s been a while since I’ve read a Gothic mystery teeming with secrets and hidden motives. Brava that “The Woman in the Castello,” your debut novel, kept me reading all day long until I managed to finish it right before bedtime. I sort of sussed out some points, suspected others, but the final twist took me by surprise.

Silvie Whitford is desperate. Her movie career hasn’t taken off yet, her mother is dying, and Silvie has a toddler to take care of. No, she doesn’t want the dirtbag she thought she was in love with to even know that Lucy – Lulu – exists. This chance to return to Italy, where Silvie was born to her young Italian mother and GI father who had married after a whirlwind meeting, will hopefully get Silvie more notice and enough money for them to survive.

So when she learns that the film has been cancelled, Silvie unsuccessfully tries to land waitressing jobs before reluctantly turning to her last hope – her aunt with whom her mother has been estranged for Silvie’s entire life. Gabriella Conti is charismatic with enough oomph to Be Noticed. She also informs Silvie that during the war, she worked with Musselini’s film industry because she wanted more than a dull life on a farm. She wanted fame and if that came with being a fascisti, so be it. This is the first of many moments when Silvie has to face her own weaknesses and decide what she’s willing to put up with, overlook, and accept in order to snatch at her dreams.

A twist of fate lands Silvie the lead role in a new film, a horror movie that will be filmed at Gabriella’s crumbling castello which is located hours outside of Rome. When Gabriella disappears and no one else seems to be worried or willing to look into it, Silvie risks rocking the filming schedule to pursue clues. Who could want her Aunt out of the way – or dead? And are the “accidents” that seem to dog Silvie on set and in the Castello just that – or worse?

The book is filled with incidents which could be innocent or not. People have legitimate reasons to see Gabriella out of the way but these could also be mere coincidence or figments of Silvie’s growing unease and worry. The Castello is a moldy, falling down wreck which adds atmosphere to the film but which also creeps most people out. Everyone’s got a secret or two and Silvie’s long held habit of keeping people at arm’s length makes forging friendships hard. Plus her past disastrous relationship has her doubting that any men are worth the effort. Since Silvie’s is the only (first person) POV, readers are left trying to piece the puzzle together with her, jumping at shadows, and imagining all sorts of hidden motives behind what’s going on. That is, if anything is actually going on. Could it all just be wisps of smoke?

Clues are scattered around but there are enough red herrings and suspect though maybe innocent character motives to keep readers just this side of being sure they have things figured out. The backdrop of WWII Italy looms and flares up enough to see that in the mid 1960s, some things were still not forgiven and were certainly not forgotten.

Silvie is young and her upbringing leaves her with gaps in being able to deal with some of the situations in which she finds herself. She makes mistakes which I can understand but tends to get somewhat petulant when someone didn’t act as she was hoping they would. In one case it’s a pretty big bomb that got dropped and she seemed to think it shouldn’t be so hard to accept it. Yes, Silvie, I would call a timeout, too. There is a romance but it didn’t totally convince me. A HFN would have sat better with me. Silvie is a loving mother but poor Lulu is pretty much relegated to being a plot moppet. Silvie’s, Gabriella’s, and Silvie’s mother Elena’s relationship is where I focused. Too bad that the sister’s reunion and what they discuss is mainly offpage.

I had fun sliding down into a Gothic book after a long break and this one makes me mostly satisfied in how the misdirection was handled and the heaping helpings of doom and gloom spiced up the oppressive atmosphere. Just a few things would have made me happier but I will be keeping my eyes open for your next book. B-

~Jayne

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