Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: warty!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This was a somewhat painful review to write because I've now read three novels by this author and I liked the other two, but I guess that's no guarantee you'll like them all, huh? I was finally done reviewing the three children's novels I side-tracked into, and I was really looking forward to returning to the grown-up world of Natasha Mostert. The thing is that this volume is the one I'd really wanted to read; in fact, I almost read it first, but if I'd done that, then I would probably never have wanted to read either of the other two, and I would have missed the joy which those provided.
The first of the issues I had with this was with the choice of title. It's a cliché, and as such is simply swamped by all the other titles which sport the same (or some variation of the same) title. It's not a good way to make your novel stand out, but believe it or not, that wasn't my problem with this volume! My complaint is that the choice of title did not represent the content of this novel at all accurately. Yes, there was a hint of witchery and magic here and there (and let me note in passing that a male witch is a witch, not a magician! The words are neither interchangeable nor gender specific!), but this novel really isn't a witchcraft novel, not in my opinion. This novel is much more like a murder mystery with supernatural aspects sprinkled on top, like powdered sugar on a sponge-cake.
It was a relief to discover that this novel ran along a very different vein from Mostert's previous two outings. Here, the main character is a guy instead of a woman, and he's leading a rather dishonest life. He's a corporate data miner, and is none too honest about how he does it. He's just congratulating himself on having it made, and luxuriating in his success when an old girlfriend (Frankie, now married to a wealthy businessman) comes back into his life asking him (as a favor for old time's sake), to please try and discover what happened to the businessman's son, Robert Whittington, missing, presumed dead.
Why is Frankie asking Gabriel to be a detective? Well, he has a power called 'remote viewing' where he can see things happening in places far removed from his person through the eyes of others who are (or were) there. Mostert gives us a bunch of mumbo jumbo about how this supposedly works, mentioning two investigators: Hal Puthoff, and Russell Targ, who were real scientists who investigated this purported phenomenon for 25 years - and yet never were able to establish it beyond a reasonable doubt. Hal Puthoff actually lives here in Austin, Texas, and I'm familiar with his and his partner's work. They were reputable scientists, but they were not magicians, and as I've said before, it's magicians you need on board to catch out these shysters! But this is fiction, so let's put that aside.
So Gabriel can do this remote viewing, and after having a spat with Frankie over her request, he (almost accidentally) puts himself into Robert's shoes and discovers that the latter went exploring a really weird house. It's so weird that Gabriel is ready to dismiss this as a nonsensical dream when Frankie recognizes a vital piece of evidence that enables them to nail down exactly which house Robert was in. It's owned by two sisters whom Frankie knows, and she eventually agrees to lure them out to dinner so that Gabriel can sneak into their home and check it out while they're out of the way. Before this even happens, the creepiness factor has already been put into play by Mostert and this time, that's all I'm going to give you for spoilers! What follows is nothing but speculation and teasing - and some gripes.
In general, and as I've come to expect from Mostert, the writing and plotting are good. She even beat me on a grammatical issue where I at first had read something and thought, "That's not right!", but upon re-reading I realized she was right. She makes me proud! Now I have a different, horrible creeping feeling that I need to re-read all my own writing scouring it for such errors. I'm sure all writers get that. No? It's only me? Ulp!
Given that I'm not a believer in the supernatural, I was quite warmed to read Mostert describing the the bookshelves in a home as having volumes by authors of the caliber of Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel Dennet. She could almost have been describing my own shelves. It was tempting to think that she wrote that section just for me. She didn't, of course; if she had, it would have included the other three horsemen of the Apocalypse along with Dennet: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens! But it did warm the cockles of my heart to read those names in a book about supernatural occurrences. Yes, I have cockles. Who doesn't these days?!
So while the novel started out in great form, it became problematical rather quickly, and there were issues. There always are with any writer; it's really the kind of issue and how it's handled which condemns or exalts a novel. There was one instance where two framed posters were described which made me think, at first blush, that an X files poster contained an image of Che Guevara, but I survived that confusion. Mostert sometimes belabors a point, as in reusing a phrase like "one of them" three times in two sentences, and in spelling out the full title of Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile more than once when it's really not necessary and is actually annoying. But those are minor infractions, hardly worth the telling, and if that's all it amounted to, I would have had no problem with it.
Since I'm reading Dracula right now (actually listening to it on CD as I drive to and from work) it was an amusing coincidence that there was a mention of that during a picnic in Highgate cemetery in London, but I also read this with mixed feelings because it was emphatic of a bigger issue which I had with this novel: the abrupt change in tempo. The down-shift in the story right after the Monk sisters (I'm tempted to label them twins but they're not) came onto the stage was quite startling and really impacted the story for me; from that point onwards, the pacing slowed dramatically until it really began to drag. Other readers may have no problem with this, but it really made the story sluggish and unattractive to me. From that point onwards, I found myself skipping more and more pages as the novel did not seem intent upon moving anywhere or revealing anything new. We had events and descriptions, and meetings and journeys, but none of this really moved the story significantly forward for me, and this stagnation began to bore me.
It's odd that this mire coincided with the arrival of the Monk sisters, because they were actually two bright spots in the novel. Initially I found them to be charming, fun, sexy, interesting and intriguing - as well as scary, which I am sure is exactly what the author wished. The problem was not the sisters per se, but that nothing changed as page after page after page went by. Gabriel hangs out with them, and hacks into the sister's computer and starts reading the diary one of them keeps, but we do not learn which one this was for the longest time. It harks back to the "Watcher" character in Mostert's two previous novels, and it smacks uncomfortably of stalking. Having to endure excerpt after excerpt from this nondescript, vague to the point of complete obscurity, and thoroughly uninteresting diary became tedious. It didn't add anything material to my enjoyment of the story. It didn't increase expectation or answer questions. All it made me do is wonder why there was so much of it, and would it ever end!
Also, what's a "gypsy smile"?! Ignoring the issue of whether 'gypsy' is appropriate (I thought the pc term was 'Romany' or 'Traveler'), I had no idea what this was supposed to mean. It seemed at best condescending and at worst racist. I Googled this and discovered that it's not an uncommon term, so I guess it's just me. I've never heard it before! Perhaps it hit me as being more strange than it would others because of my unfamiliarity with it.
At one point, just before the half-way point in this novel, the observation is made that there's actually a fourth member of the existing trio (consisting of the two Monk sisters and Gabriel). We're meant to understand that this is Robert Whittington, the young man whom one of these sisters purportedly murdered, but it didn't strike me that way. Robert has been all-but-forgotten in the murky depths of Gabriel's infatuation with the sisters at this point, even as Gabriel knows perfectly well that they're purposefully seducing him, just as they seduced Robert. This made me lose all faith and interest in Gabriel. I really stopped caring about him at that point and honestly felt that he deserved whatever came his way. His lethargy was a real personification of the lethargy inherent in the entire story by then, and it contributed heavily to the feeling that this was dragging on for no good purpose.
To me, the fourth member of this group, the one who turns the trio into a quartet, was the cat which the sisters kept as a pet. I had honestly felt that Mostert was going somewhere with that since she made such an issue of its relationship with Gabriel, but in the end it went nowhere at all, which caused me to wonder why all the fuss about the cat in the first place? You know, black cat, story about witches? Shouldn't something happen?! What did happen was that this non-event contributed yet again to my feeling of being cheated out of a good witch story!
So in the end I cannot rate this a worthy read, because I was so disappointed in it. It rested on a great idea and started out well, but it simply seeped away into nothing, leaving me feeling drained in the end! I'm sorry but that's the best I can do with this one! I can recommend reading other titles by Natasha Mostert, because she can tell a good story. Just not this time. Not for me.
