Books 62-65
A Sanctuary of Spirits by Leanna Renee Hieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Many series you can come in anywhere and be okay. This isn't one of them. You absolutely need to read book one or you will be lost otherwise. Eve Whitby is part of what the logline says is "New York, 1899, and the police department’s best ally is the secret Ghost Precinct, where spirits and psychics help solve the city’s most perplexing crimes " and that's really the plot right there.
Eve and her friends (including a young woman with selective mutism, a woman of African descent and a transwoman) are all psychics (where psychic abilities are real vs faked). Firmly on their side is Detective Horowitz who, being Jewish, is nearly as on the outside of the NYPD as the women are. Ghosts are disappearing. Women are vanishing. Eve's own grandmother had been kidnapped (much of this is all threads from novel one). Eve and her friends have to find out what is happening to the ghosts, what might be interfering with their psychic powers and what threatens the still-alive women.
Overly lying that is Eve and Horowitz who are fake dating to keep their families off their backs (keeping in mind this is 1899) and their growing attraction to each other which is fraught with issues, namely married women often were barred from working and Eve is not Jewish. Also jealousies play a role as people from their past appear (probably my least favorite part as jealousy is a turn off for me).
It's very obviously inspired by the Gothic fiction of the 1800s and has that feel to it. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next book in the series. While the main plot line wraps up in this, many are left dangling for the next book.
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The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer by Dean Jobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For me, this suffered only slightly because I had just finished a book on poisons and poisoners and had Cream on my brain already (which just sounds weird). Also if there was one thing I didn't like about the book it was the flip flopping through time. It starts with him being let out of an Illinois prison which was prelude to the final murders he committed.
The book is otherwise highly engaging and has over 100 pages of sources so you can't ask for a more well researched book! Dr. Thomas Cream was a serial killer long before they had a term for that. He showed some truly interesting and bizarre psychological quirks, one of which led to his downfall. He was in fact a doctor and the son of a wealthy man. He was also a con man and misogynist. He loved having sex, was a lot less happy about parenthood and marriage though. He was a known abortionist (at a time where it was illegal in any of the three countries he practiced in, Canada, England and America). He definitely had issues with prostitutes. He loved hiring them but he also loved poisoning them.
The weirdest quirk isn't really that he liked poisoning women. It was that he liked writing blackmail notes trying to frame others and liked letting the police know someone had murdered these women (most of which would have gone unnoticed as well who cares about prostitutes right? That was certainly the attitude of the police and community at large then). If he hadn't written the letters his killing years would have lasted a lot longer.
It's definitely a book worth looking at if you like true crime.
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West Virginia Ghost Stories, Legends, and Haunts by Jannette Quackenbush
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a lot of fun especially if you think of the hauntings as lagniappes. The state is broken up into regions and then we're given little write ups on the haunts. Many of them are public places (civil war sites for example) where you could visit if you want. A lot of the author's own pictures are used here as she's been to every site in the book. There isn't much on any one site (with the exception of the really well known ones) and is more about the local legends of these places vs an investigation of the haunts. I quite liked this.
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Evansville Monsters: Weird Tales of Goblins, Ghoulies, and Ghosts by Kyle Darnell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I received this one as a gift and I was excited to see Evansville's urban legends, only that's not what this is. Mr. Darnell took the local urban legends and turned it into a short story anthology. If you think about it, that's sort of a neat idea, really. I am not a huge short story fan though.
I will say these are well written (and honestly the wood block art style that went with each story might be my favorite thing about this) though some stories take a lot of liberties such as the haunting of Willard library, a ghost I've actually gone hunting for and doesn't have a violent reputation (though that would make for a far more boring story, right?)
The maniac of Mesker Park Zoo might have been my favorite (and one of the few legends I hadn't heard of before). All of the stories are good though but with any anthology there is some hit or miss. The one thing I will say is, this really needed better editing. I'm not sure who edited it but every story had the right spelling but wrong word issues, a few homophone errors and a few that are just plain spelled wrong. It was distracting in an otherwise enjoyable anthology.
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