Dark Prayer by Natasha Mostert

Title: Dark Prayer
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic Ltd (website not found)
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p81 " Jungles' " should be " Jungles's " - since 'Jungles' is the guy's nickname, it's not a plural.

I've had mixed results with this author sometimes liking her work (two novels), other times not so much (one novel before this, now two novels). The problem in this case is that quite literally as soon as I began this novel I was simultaneously thinking that I wasn't going to like it.

A while ago I vowed never to read another novel which had a main character named Jack, and what did I read when I reached only the seventh word in chapter one? Yep. Jack. The problem is that when I made that vow, I still had a lot of novels in my reading list that I was committed to reviewing! A heck of a lot, including this one.

What's as disturbing as it is amusing is that a disproportionate number of those novels on my list seem to feature a character named Jack. Recently, post-vow, I even voluntarily took on a review of yet another novel with such a character as a favor to an author. Fortunately, that one turned out to be a worthy read, but I still didn't like the Jack character in it! I detest that name because it is the single most over-used and clichéd character name in writing history, and "Jack" - intended by the unimaginative author to be a rascal and a scalawag, typically ends up being a thoroughly obnoxious jack-ass.

It's tedious to have to keep on reading novels which suck on each other like so many incestuous vampires, re-employing so uninventive a character name just because they think it does all their work for them. It's also unrealistic, especially in this story. They're of Italian ancestry, Jack's father's name is Leon, yet he and his wife chose to name their son Jack? It doesn't flow. So here we go again!

Jack is of course (and quite predictably so) the spoiled brat ne'er-do-well son of a fabulously wealthy American businessman. He's given one last chance to reform or he'll be cut off by his father without a penny to his name. The bizarre thing is that his "job" is to fly to England to visit with an old college friend of his father's and provide whatever help he needs for as long as he needs it. This is almost as big of a mystery to Jack as it is to the reader. Why trust this perennial loser with an important task for a dear old friend? It made no sense to me, unless of course there was something truly under-hand going on and it involved Jack's own father as well as the college friend.

In England, Jack learns that the task with which he's charged is to get close to Daniel Barone's estranged daughter, Jenilee Gray. Jenilee went missing for almost two years and when she was discovered by a private investigator hired by Daniel, she was a different person, almost literally. She looked different, and behaved very differently from Jenilee, and now she goes by the name of Eloise Blake.

After she was located, Daniel had met with her and she had rebuffed him, yet he still feels a need to interfere because he thinks she's being targeted by someone who wants to kill her, but it seems more likely that he just wants to reclaim her. He sees her as a form of property. Unfortunately over the course of this novel, all we see change is that the property rights to Jenilee/Eloise are transferred from Daniel to Jack. In the end, that's killed this novel for me.

Jack is trapped in this reclamation plan of Daniel's, but his behavior still doesn't suggest that he has a decent bone in his body. Never once does he raise an objection, no matter how circumspectly, now matter how tentatively, to Daniel about how wrong it is to try and reel his daughter back in when she's made it quite clear she wants nothing to do with him. We can only guess at the reason she wanted out. Incest perhaps? Some dire family secret like misplaced parentage? Something else, like experimentation on a child? All of the above? Is it Daniel who's surreptitiously threatening her life and thereby trying to sway her back into his own fold?

The superficial reason why Jack is chosen to get close to her and find out what happened is that both he and Eloise are parkour devotees, and it may seem like a good reason. The problem is that Jack hasn't done parkour in ages, and it seemed to me unlikely that his cold and distant father would really know very much about his interests and habits, much less care about them to the point where he could bring this to his friend Daniel's attention. It's possible, I guess. Despite Kirkus's gushingly inane review of this novel (Kirkus almost uniformly positively reviews novels so their blessing is meaningless), Parkour actually plays very little part in it - at least in the portion I read, but I'm guessing it's somehow involved in a dramatic escape at the end.

My first real problem with Jack is how superficial he is. His only observation of this woman is how pretty Jenilee was, and how beautiful Eloise is. Admittedly he has at that point only photographs to go on, but this viewpoint doesn't change even after he gets to "know" her. His brainlessness is proven before we reach the half-way point by his blabbing that he loves Eloise when he barely knows her. It's pathetic, and so shallow that it's almost a parody.

I found it very sad that yet another female writer is promoting superficial looks right up front as the only important thing worth noting about a woman. I see this repeatedly in YA literature. It's abusive and it doesn't ameliorate it in the slightest to give your character odd eyes, like this 'makes her a bit ugly' so it's okay now to type her as beautiful and offer nothing else? And yes, rest assured that she does have the trope gold flecks in her eye! Here they're described as yellow, but it's still the same YA cliché that I see in almost every YA novel that has a so-called romantic angle. It's the LAW! Eyes have to have gold flecks in them! On. Pain. Of. Death! Deal with it! Sheesh!

This would not have been half as bad had Daniel given Jack a verbal portrait of Jenilee beforehand, thereby offering him something to admire, something to prick his interest or to stir his motivation, but this never happens. The meeting between Daniel and Jack is brief to the point of it being a prologue (there is also an actual prologue, which I skipped as I always do because if the writer doesn't think it's worthy of putting it right there in chapter one, then I don't think it's worth my time reading it - and I've never missed it).

The point here is that we learn nothing of the Jenilee who existed before the Eloise pushed her off stage - other than that she was overweight as judged from the photos! Jenilee 2.0, aka Eloise, is a slim & trim version because - once again the message is clear - only looks are important! All we're offered is the new "beautiful" contrasted with the old, out-dated "pretty" and that doesn't cut it any more. In fact, it's thoroughly inadequate. It's even sick. This attitude is further amplified on page 49 where Daniel's only important memory of two dead female family members is that "They were so beautiful" - because women have no other value than as set decorations. Yeah we get the message.

Women deserve a lot better than to be judged and categorized (and very effectively marginalized and dismissed from importance) by having some shallow loser named Jack rate them as "beautiful" or otherwise. It would have been a far more interesting challenge for a writer, from my PoV, to have Jack be the playboy he is, but then to fall for this woman (as we know he inevitably will because what is this if not yet another St George slaying the dragon and rescuing the helpless maiden story?) not because she's a snappily-dressed beauty queen, but because she's the very opposite: in short, that she's actually a real woman rather than a Barbie doll. Why won't writers do this? My feeling is that it's because it's a lot easier not to do all that work, that's why.

Back to the story. Superficially, it would seem that Jenilee simply got scared of something and purposefully chose to go into hiding, but we also get the story from Eloise's PoV, and it's clear that something's going on with her that makes this a bit more complex. It's like she has flashbacks or hidden memories threatening to resurface, or something, and she doesn't know what those are. She's all but living in poverty now, working on a market stall in London, and spending a lot of her time parkour running - and stealing books! Unfortunately the admirable parts of her character are all-too-quickly subsumed under the need to render her into a damsel in distress so "Dashing Jack" can rescue her. I'm really surprised that Jack isn't some sort of captain.

It struck me as odd, given the circumstances of her 'disappearance' that no one is even slightly suspicious that there must be something dangerous going on. Daniel thinks she's had some sort of dissociative episode, but he does believe that someone is trying to kill her (or at least that what the writer wants we readers to believe!), and no one seems to connect that with the curious details of her disappearance, which I'm not going to relate here. I was sorry that Jack didn't think to ask the private detective about Daniel himself and his mysterious house-mate Francis Godine. I think those two know a lot more than we're being told!

On page 72, there's a line of text taken straight from the movie There's a Girl in my Soup - a dear favorite of mine featuring Peter Sellars and Goldie Hawn, except that the line was changed in the movie from the original play (which at the time was the longest running comedy play in the history of the West End). Playwright Terence Frisby had it better: "My eyes feel like two rissoles in the snow". Unfortunately, the Americans don't know what rissoles are, so I guess that's why it was changed, but the changed version makes no sense in the context in which it's offered. The movie is very dated now (the play is from the mid-sixties, the movie from the seventies), but I recommend it; both Hawn and Sellars are priceless.

The ease with which Jack associates himself with Eloise is not credible. We're told that she's a highly suspicious person (as should be expected, given what's happened to her), yet she takes to Jack like a duck to water. I didn't buy it at all. It was too easy, especially given how they met, and soon they're bosom buddies, with Jack even resenting her platonic relationship with her muscular friend 'Jungles'.

At one point Jack harbors an unspoken snide observation about Jungles drinking green tea. He associated that with an aversion to caffeine, but unless it's decaff (which isn't specified here), green tea actually contains caffeine! Depending on how long it's brewed (which ideally is tied to quality: the higher quality being brewed for a shorter time) it can contain just as much caffeine as does black tea, so either the author or Jack isn't very well-informed here.

In the Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel, on page 97, there's a link to a New York Times article - a link which is broken. I don't know if this is on purpose because the article is fake or what. I've seen this in other novels too. It's just irritating! I suspect it's an error - a fake URL actually showing up as a real link in ADE. Anyway, to cut a long review short, the story progresses as it should, with Jack discovering more about Eloise, and becoming ever more intrigued as the mystery deepens. The big question is what's going to transpire when she discovers that he's been stalking her? Well, there's an app for that!

Eloise was not as impressive as she might sound from the early rushes. Given what she's been through, I would have expected more caution on her part, yet she displays a disturbing lack of it on too many occasions, which flatly contradicts her behavior at other points in the story. For example, one time she takes a bath and fails to lock doors even though she had a creepy (if unsubstantiated) feeling that there was someone in the house. This made no sense.

What really turned me off this story, however, was when I got into the 150 page range, where Super-Jack swoops in on poor, lost Eloise and takes over her life. It was at this point that I decided I did not want to read yet another story about how weak and ineffectual women are, and how desperately beholden they are that there are dashing men readily available to save them. I did not want to continue reading this story about a devilish guy named Jack telling a woman - a woman who had hitherto proven herself commendably independent and strong - what to do, and the woman submissively letting him take the reins because let's face it, women are really just little girls who desperately need a macho daddy figure to take care of everything for them, aren't they? That's the take home lesson here, at any rate, regardless of what sycophants at certain widely quoted review websites may claim!

I couldn't read any more of this after that point, so I can't comment on the ending except to say I already know exactly how it will turn out: Devil-may-care Jack (an American who says "Bloody!") will get his chickie. Of course he will. All I can say is I cannot in good faith recommend a novel which infantilizes women so inexcusably as this one does.

Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert

Title: Season of the Witch
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.

Windwalker by Natasha Mostert

Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

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 is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!

The Midnight Side by Natasha Mostert

Title: The Midnight Side
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

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) any other remuneration for this review.

Not to be confused with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight or with Terri Marie's The Wrong Side of Midnight, or with Mia Zachary's Another Side of Midnight, or M D Nygaard's The Other Side of Midnight, or Patrick DiCiccio's The Jagged Side of Midnight...do you see where I'm going with this? Pick a more distinctive title please? My new title is going to be The Clichéd Side of Midnight, or An Order of 11:59pm, with Midnight on the Side or maybe, yeah: The Half-Assed Side of Midnight....

I'm brand new to Natasha Mostert and I've brashly taken on three of her novels so I sincerely hope she doesn’t let me down! This one is Mostert's debut novel, first published in 1999, but republished with some serious editing last year. Let me offer a full disclosure up front, that I do not believe in any supernatural crap and the reason for this is reason itself! I've seen no valid or even useful evidence for the existence of any of it: gods, devils, demons, magic (black, white, or grey), witchcraft (as opposed to Wicca, which does exist, but is nothing more than a harmless belief, unlike major religions), ESP, clairvoyance, astrology, telekinesis, ghosts, etc., etc., etc. Neither do I believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster (although I did write a novel about it!) and so on. I do, however, love a really good story about any of these topics on the rare occasion I can find one. I'm hoping this is a rare occasion!

First impressions were good. Mostert is a descriptive writer with an eye for a turn of phrase, although she's a bit too fond of 'vertiginous' and I'm not convinced she's using it correctly, but I’ll give her the benefit on that score! Having said that, she doesn’t dally too much, moving the story along with a playful tease here, some disturbing suspense there, just to keep your imagination tickled. There are some bits here and there which become bogged down in memory/flashback, and a bit too much detail for the minor characters, but not enough to tick me off. I do confess to disappointment in her female protagonist. I prefer a good strong female character, and Isabelle is a bit of a wuss, but I am trying to overlook that and some of her sorry behaviors (more anon) as I read this. Or should I say behaviours, since this is set in Britain?

With regard to the setting, kudos! It begins in South Africa, which is where Isabelle is resident, but she's called to Britain by the death of her best friend Alette. A death I immediately suspected as being rather more than accidental, suspicious old me. This actually distracted me because it reminded me of a short story I wrote, but let’s not dwell on that. What I want to mention is how thoroughly Americanized the writing world is - at least the one in which I've been immersed for evidently too long. When this novel mentioned flying from South Africa to the UK, I was lost for a minute. I had assumed this was set in the US, so this itinerary thoroughly confused me! How god-awfully sad is that?! I was thrilled to be proven wrong.

Anyway, enough rambling. So Isabelle is awakened early one morning by a phone-call from Alette, on a really bad line, asking fro Isabelle's help, and implying serious problems. When she receives another call later that morning from Alette's lawyer, informing her of Alette's death in a car accident, Isabelle is shocked, but nowhere near as shocked as she is to discover that this death occurred two days prior to Alette's phone call!

Isabelle learns that not only is she Alette's sole beneficiary, she's also tasked by Alette with something which the lawyer says he needs to discuss with her in person. This is the first of my annoyances with Isabelle's personality - rather than rail against this, or at least object, she meekly complies, traveling to London. She learns that Alette left her three letters, each one to be dispensed to Isabelle on a weekly basis. The first of reveals how awful her originally ideal marriage to Justin was. It began perfectly, but, Alette reveals, it rapidly descended into Justin becoming a control freak in the most extreme ways possible short of physically imprisoning Alette. Even after she divorced him, he continued to stalk her, begging her to return to him, almost literally showering her with flowers and cards. The night she died, she had gone to have it out with him and get him off her back once and for all, and she was in the accident on her way home.

Justin isn't the only guy involved with Alette. Michael lives in a flat (apartment) across the street from Alette's house, and he has a habit of entering the house uninvited, of which Isabelle is unaware to begin with. The first time she meets Justin on this trip is also when he lets himself into the house, but she never tackles him on the matter, and never considers changing the locks! I must admit it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't Justin who stalked Alette after the divorce, but Michael, pretending to be Justin? Or is there something else entirely going on?

Alette's request in the first envelope is that Isabelle help her get revenge upon Justin by bringing down his pharmaceutical company, and she details her plan for doing this with which, again annoyingly, Isabelle complies, since it involves "only" making three phone calls to stock-brokers, questioning the company's viability regarding manufacturing supplies, and mailing two letters (which Isabelle doesn't read). Isabelle, at this point, is a puppet whose strings are caught upon whomever happens to be closest. This isn’t a surprise given the flashbacks we get, disruptive to the story as they are. She accepts an invitation to dinner with Justin despite all she has read about him from Alette. The question is (for me anyway at this point): is she smart to do so - will this begin a friendship to show that Justin isn't quite as bad as he's painted, and it's Michael who's the bad guy, or is she sliding blindly down the same slippery road upon which Alette slid, and only Michael can save her? Interesting, huh? Except that it looks like Isabelle is going to need saving by one or other of these two guys, which doesn’t work well for me! Maybe I'm wrong!

The more I read of this, the more convinced I became that things might be backwards: that Alette is the villain, and Justin the wronged party, and that the lawyer, Lionel Darling is also a villain (especially given the reveal about his troubled childhood), and Michael, the too-friendly neighbor, merely a red-herring. I suspect both Michale and Lionel because Mostert has them both out of town - obviously in the hoe that when she writes more of her anonymous stalker's activities I will think it cannot be either of those guys. Hah! In short, Mostert was doing a wonderful job of screwing with my mind! It has also occurred to me that Alette is still alive, and/or that Darling was orchestrating the whole thing using Alette as a ruse, using Isabelle to pose as The Wisdom and undermine Justin's corporation with her phone-calls for Darling's own purposes. One after another, new theories arose to explain the new information that Mostert leaked with cruelly metronomic ruthlessness, and even more cruel thrift.

I don't get the point of a weak character being the main protagonist in a novel unless they learn how to become strong over the course of the story. I can see how you could work it with a weak character depending upon the story you're telling, but in this one, it’s not working well for someone like me, who adores strong female characters. Well over half-way through, Isabelle shows no sign of taking charge of her life, constantly allowing herself to be led by the nose by various men, including Justin and Michael. Of course, she has a history of this. Alette did this to her throughout their childhood together, and even now is doing it from the grave. Isabelle also allowed a married man to do this to her back in South Africa. With Justin, even after she swore to herself that she wouldn't see him again, she lets him drag her out of the house (metaphorically speaking!) to go on a picnic on a day which is really too cold, and then take her on a tour of some of London's tourist spots.

I'm not going to reveal any more of this. I finished it (it's an easy read) and though the ending was a bit flat, I consider this to be a worthy novel. That's fortunate for me, since I have two more Mosterts to get through! Let me just conclude by saying that one of my guesses was, amazingly, spot on, but you're gonna have to read it find out which one (like you care!). That's the joy of making a sesquicentillion guesses - at least one of them is likely to be close! I don't know what this was like before she got in there and polished it up for re-release, but whatever she did was worth her efforts. I recommend this one.