Publisher: 8th Circle Press
Pages: 432
Blurb
New Orleans, four months
after the events of THE QUEEN...
Søren has been suspended from the Jesuits for a minimum of one year after confessing to fathering a child. To say he's struggling with his newfound freedom is an understatement.
Kingsley is about to be a father again and is convinced something very bad is about to happen. Nerves? Or is he right that the time has come for the Sinners to pay for their sins?
And if things couldn't get worse, a handsome private detective shows up and tells Mistress Nora that a priest has just committed suicide, and she was the last person he tried to call. He would like to know why...
She doesn't know, but Nora and her new detective friend will turn over the city to find out, meeting liars, vampires, and witches along the way. When she finds what she's looking for, she may wish she'd never stepped foot in New Orleans.
Review
“They were more like a spiderweb, all of them,
made of filaments so fragile and fine nothing could put them back together if
one of them was torn away…”
… and Nora decides to
help investigate a suicide that may well cause those filaments to shrivel up and
die.
Oh my God, what a book.
I’m not sure how I’m going to put my thoughts and feelings into words,
especially since I want to avoid spoilers, but … WOW. Not that I’m surprised.
Tiffany Reisz is yet to let me down. But I’m not sure I was ready for this
story. Then again, maybe I was. Maybe I’d been waiting for this story ever
since I first read the Siren.
I’m sorry, I’m reviewing
in riddles, and I can’t promise that’s going to get a whole lot better as I go
on. I want to say all the things, and I don’t want to risk spoiling even the
tiniest of details.
As always with Tiffany
Reisz, this is a story with many layers; quite possibly more than I managed to
discover on a first read. There’s the mystery Nora gets pulled into after a
priest commits suicide. The last number he called before pulling the trigger
was Nora’s old number and when Cyrus, the private detective trying to find out
why the priest took this drastic action, approaches her, he pulls her into the
case. A case which will bring them into contact with fascinating characters, vampires,
and witches (well, what would you expect in New Orleans?). A case that will show Cyrus a way of life he barely knew existed,
and a case that will turn two people who, at first glance, have very little in
common, into friends.
But there’s more…so much
more. There’s Søren and Nora and their complicated, fascinating, scary, and
stunningly beautiful, yet fragile relationship.
“Twenty-three years together, and he could still make her toes curl and
give her goosebumps and scare her down to the bone.
It was a sacred thing to be loved by a sadist like Søren. Sacred like a
sacrifice, like a vestal virgin offered to a god. What was a god, anyway, but
one who held the power of life and death in his hands? By that measure, surely
Søren qualified, if only when they made love.”
And there’s the thing I
don’t want to mention except to say that it answered something I’d been
wondering about for as long as I’ve been reading the Original Sinners’ books. I
approve of the way that ‘issue’ was resolved. It made sense and I had been anticipating
it. And it was a wonderful illustration of how we sometimes don’t allow
ourselves to see the full picture of who we are and how we reached a certain
point in our lives until something from the outside forces us to open our eyes.
Again, I’m sorry. I’m
being horribly mysterious but, if you are still to read the book, you wouldn’t
thank me for saying more.
There was so much to
love in this book. Kingsley, Juliette (expecting her second baby), and Celeste
are delightful secondary characters. I adored Nora’s dog, Gmork. But I think I
loved the developing friendship between Nora and Cyrus best. These two have little
to nothing in common and Cyrus is definitely not a part of Nora’s kinky world.
But their differences allowed them to be exactly what the other needed at
various points in the story and I can’t help hoping that we’ll see more of
Cyrus and his fiancée Paulina in future books.
I’m going to leave it here.
Nobody is going to get anything out me making more vague yet gushing statements.
Just go and read the book. And if you’ve so far managed to miss the Original Sinners’
series (what stone have you been living under?), all I can say is, pick up The
Siren and start on a journey that will mesmerize and captivate you. Nine books
in, and all titles still feature at the top of my ‘extra-special list’.
“If anything in the world was truly a sin, it was letting one’s own mild
discomfort interfere with someone else’s healing.”
