Hester Young: CHARLIE CATES TRILOGY

Author:  Hester Young 
Series:  CHARLIE CATES TRILOGY 

Plot Type: Romantic Paranormal Mystery/Thriller

Ratings:  Violence—3; Sensuality—3; Humor—2 
Publisher:  G.P. Putnam's Sons (Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC) 
    1  The Gates of Evangeline (9/2015) 

    2  The Shimmering Road (2/2017)

This ongoing post was updated on 3/1/2017 to include a review of The Shimmering Road, the second novel in the trilogy. That review appears first, followed by a brief overview of the world-building and a review of the first novel.

                    NOVEL 2: The Shimmering Road                    
PUBLISHER'S BLURB:  

     A pulse-pounding mystery from the author of The Gates of Evangeline featuring Charlotte “Charlie” Cates, an unforgettable heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that will save or destroy those around her. 

     When soon-to-be mother Charlotte “Charlie” Cates begins to have recurring dreams about harm coming to her unborn daughter, she knows these are not the nightmares of an anxious mom-to-be. They are the result of her mysterious gift. But before she can decipher what these dreams might mean, Charlie learns that the mother who abandoned her when she was a toddler is the victim of a double murder in Arizona. The other victim—Jasmine, a half-sister Charlie never knew she had—has left behind a child, a little girl who speaks to Charlie in her dreams and was present on the night of the murders. Convinced that she must help her orphaned niece, Charlie travels to Tucson, Arizona, where she must confront her painful ties to her mother and delve into her sister’s shadowy past.

     To untangle the web of secrets that will reveal the truth of her nightmares, Charlie can no longer avoid her family’s checkered history. Who is in the racy photos that turned up in Jasmine’s apartment? Where is her niece’s father, whom Jasmine was rumored to have been seeing again on the sly? Was her mother’s charity work in Mexico really as selfless as it seemed? And most important of all, what did her niece really witness on the night of the murders?

     The search for answers leads Charlie across the Mexican border, from the resort town of Rocky Point to the border town of Nogales, and elucidates the meaning of her dreams in most unexpected ways. Ultimately, to protect her niece and her unborn child, Charlie must battle not just evil but the forces of nature, in one final terrifying encounter in the Tucson desert.

     A thrilling mystery that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist that is unputdownable. If you love Kate Atkinson and Alice Sebold, you should not miss Hester Young.

MY REVIEW: 

     The story begins about eight months after the ending of The Gates of Evangeline. Charlie is now living in Sidalie, Texas, with her baby daddy, Noah Palmer. Yes, Charlie is 34 weeks pregnant—the result of an alcohol-fueled night of unprotected sex with Noah back in New Orleans. Although they were blindsided by the pregnancy, their budding romance has, so far, survived, and even blossomed. Noah is pushing for marriage, but Charlie isn't ready to commit to a new relationship that might fail just as badly as her first marriage. The author divides the novel into seven parts, all based on the geographical location of the action, which moves back and forth among four locations: Sidalie; Tucson, Arizona; Sonora, Mexico; and Nogales, Mexico.

     Once again, Charlie is having nightmares about the death of a child—this time her own child—her unborn baby girl. In her recurring dream, Charlie is always taking a shower in the same bathroom when she is shot three times and dies. She has shared the dream with Noah, who fully believes in her visions (because he has seen them come true), and they are both on the lookout for the specific blue-and-yellow-tiled shower that appears in that nightmare.

     In Part I, Charlie has a new dream. This one features a small dark-haired child walking through puddles of blood in search of her mother. The next morning, Charlie's Aunt Suzie calls to inform her that Charlie's mother (Donna) and her half-sister (Jasmine) are dead—shot by an unknown murderer in Jasmine's Tucson apartment. Naturally, this is a huge shock for Charlie. Donna left town when Charlie was just an infant, and she has neither seen nor heard from Donna since. Even worse, Charlie never even knew that Jasmine existed. Adding to the tragedy, Jasmine's young daughter (Micky) was in the apartment when the shootings occurred and may have seen or heard the killer. (Notice the connection between the murder and Charlie's nightmare.) Micky has been placed in foster care, but Charlie and Noah agree that since she is part of Charlie's family, they need to go to Tucson and scope out the situation with an eye toward a possible adoption.

     When Charlie and Noah get to Tucson, they gradually get drawn into the murder investigation, which the police are treating as a drug-related crime (because a hoard of Rohypnol was found in the apartment). But as Charlie meets Donna's friends and learns about her life as an advocate for abused women, Charlie isn't so sure that the police are on the right track. Then Charlie begins to have dreams about a dead girl—one of Donna's clients—who supposedly killed herself. The girl lets Charlie know that her death was murder, not suicide, and begs Charlie to help her younger sister. As Charlie and Noah wade deeper and deeper into the case, their own lives become endangered.

     Young has created a complex mystery/thriller with a well-drawn set of likely suspects who will keep you guessing all the way to the end of the story. Who was the real target of the murderer, Jasmine or Donna? Was Jasmine using/selling drugs? Was Donna? Is Jasmine's aggressive boyfriend (a policeman) involved in the crime? Why is his partner following Charlie? Who is the threatening man in the pineapple-printed, Hawaiian shirt? From the moment she involves herself in the investigation, Charlie can't trust anyone because she finds that they are all holding back information and keeping dark, personal secrets.

     Charlie is particularly conflicted in her feelings about her mother. Did Donna truly clean up her life, or did she drop back into her old habits of drug and alcohol abuse? As she listens to Donna's Tucson friends extol Donna for her compassionate work for the abused women of Nogales, Charlie muses, "Why couldn't my long-lost mother be a junkie, a self-involved bitch, some cheap and stupid floozy I'd never miss? Did she really have to Do Good Things? To have been a positive influence in the life of a child? If my mother had value as a human being, if she could demonstrate kindness and compassion in her life, where does that leave me, the daughter she discarded and forgot?" But then more clues accumulate that cast a darker light on Donna's activities in Nogales, and Charlie wonders, "Who were you, Donna?...Were you good or were you bad? a saint or sinner? And the biggest question of all: "Who killed you?" 

     Meanwhile, Noah is desperate to keep Charlie and their unborn baby safe, while Charlie is just as determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. Adding to the friction between Charlie and Noah is Carmen, Noah's gorgeous ex-wife. She is an attorney who enters the story at a critical time to help save Noah from being sent to jail for a crime he didn't commit. 

     Charlie is writer, so she always notices the mundane details of life, particularly in her descriptions of various people she meets. I don't mean to pick on realtors, but here are Charlie's descriptions of two of them. In Sedalie: "Brandi Babcock may possess the name of a porn star, but she has the body of a butternut squash, a solid top that flares out into an epically large backside." And in Tucson: "He wears a golf shirt, khaki shorts, and large aviator sunglasses, and his hair is slick with gel....he smells like a frat boy—Axe body spray or something like that. His skin emits waves so intense that I wonder briefly if my gestating child will suffer grave birth defects with prolonged exposure."

     Young has created a suspense-filled thriller in which her intelligent and adventurous heroine deals with burgeoning pregnancy while listening to the women and children in her visionary dreams and doing her best to save them. I have to admit, I thought that I had figured out the bad-guy situation several times, but was always wrong—so wrong! My advice is to keep guessing, but relax and trust Young to roll out the mystery slowly and carefully, rewarding you with a big slam-bang ending that will answer all of your questions. Warning: If you are in the habit of reading the ending first, you will hate yourself because that would defuse the suspense and take all of the joy out of Young's meticulous, tension-filled build-up to the big reveal scene.

A dwelling at the
Tirabichi dump.

Child waste-pickers gather
recyclables at Tirabichi.

    Click HERE to read Frost Magazine's "A Day in the Life/Hester Young" photo essay that follows the author as she visits southern Arizona and the Mexico borderlands to research the compelling scenes set in the settlement that formerly existed at the Tirabichi garbage dump just outside Nogales. Here is Charlie's description: "I see it all in three vivid dimensions: the mountains of trash, the human dwellings constructed from waste, the trees adorned with whatever plastic bags caught a breeze, and the strangely pastoral green hills rolling in the valley below. This is the stuff of postapocalyptic action movies, the kind of bleak and gritty setting Hollywood directors spend millions trying to achieve, only with more sunlight, more color."

     Click HERE to go to this novel's Amazon.com page where you can read or listen to an excerpt by clicking on either the cover art for print or the "Listen" icon for audio.

                          WORLD-BUILDING                              

     Young's inspiration for the first novel in this series comes from a recurring dream her grandmother had about the death of one of her sons. She constantly dreamed that he fell from an open window, and eventually that is exactly what happened. After his death, Young's grandmother never dreamed that dream again. 

     As the series opens, the heroine―Charlotte "Charlie" Cates―is trying to pull her life back together several months after her four-year-old son, Keegan, dies suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Charlie, who is divorced from Keegan's cheating father, has only one other relative, her grandmother, who is in a local assisted living facility. Charlie's mother deserted her during her early childhood, and her father was an alcoholic who died in an alcohol-fueled auto wreck when she was just fourteen. From that point on, her grandmother raised her.

     Several months after Keegan's death, Charlie begins having premonitory dreams about children. Unlike Young's grandmother, Charlie's dreams are not about her son. Instead, she has prophetic dreams about familiar and unfamiliar children, both dead and alive, many of whom speak to her and ask her to help them. 

     In an online guest blog, Young shares her thoughts on fictional heroines: “I’ve always enjoyed female characters who, for better or for worse, actively shape their own fate. Don’t give me a heroine who finds herself paralyzed by fear—at least let her try to smash the bad guy in the head with a lamp. The fictional women I want to spend my time with may not be entirely wholesome rays of sunshine, but they are resourceful, courageous, clever. They are individuals and not accessories." Charlie Cates certainly lives up to Young's description. As she tells her story in her wry, self-aware, first-person voice, we watch her set up her investigation, draw conclusions (frequently not the correct ones) from the clues she gathers, and begin to make friends in this new life she is developing for herself. 

                        NOVEL 1:  The Gates of Evangeline                             PUBLISHER'S BLURB: 
     From a unique new talent comes a fast-paced debut, introducing a heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that will heal or destroy those around her. 

     When grieving mother and New York journalist Charlie Cates begins to experience vivid dreams about children after her only son passes away, she’s sure that she’s lost her mind. Yet she soon realizes these are not the hallucinations of a bereaved mother. They are messages and warnings that will help Charlie and the children she sees―if she can make sense of them. 

     The disturbing images lead her from her home in suburban New York City to small-town Louisiana, where she takes a commission to write a true-crime book based on the case of Gabriel Deveau, the young heir to a wealthy and infamous Southern family, whose kidnapping thirty years ago has never been solved. There she meets the Deveau family, none of whom are telling the full truth about the night Gabriel disappeared. And as she uncovers long-buried secrets of love, money, betrayal, and murder, the facts begin to implicate those she most wants to trust―and her visions reveal an evil closer than she could have imagined.

     A Southern Gothic mystery debut that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist, The Gates of Evangeline is a story that readers of Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson, and Alice Sebold won't be able to put down. 

     Click HERE and scroll down to read an the prologue and chapter one of this novel, or click HERE to listen to January LaVoy read that same excerpt aloud. (Note: LaVoy also narrates Kim Harrison's new series, PERI REED CHRONICLES.)

MY REVIEW:

Charlie's dream about
the little boy in the swamp

     As this this Southern Gothic thriller opens, Charlie is living in Stamford, Connecticut, so grief-stricken over her son's death that she has nearly lost the will to keep up a normal life. Her professional life as managing editor of a Cosmopolitan-like magazine is no longer appealing, but when an old friend offers her a job writing a book about the disappearance of a young Louisiana boy thirty years ago, she almost turns him down. Then, she dreams about a dead boy who has been drowned in a swamp, probably by a sexual abuser: "A picture forms. Swamp. I'm in a rowboat, drifting through brown water and swirls of green scum. Around me I see dead leaves, rotted branches curling like fingers, partially submerged trees clawing their way upward. On my right, I catch a flash of movement. Watchful green eyes peer up at me. An alligator." The little boy is glad to see her: "Will you help me?…He hurt me…You gotta tell on him." As Charlie awakens and the dream fades away, she wonders if this boy could be Gabriel Deveau, the two-year old toddler who disappeared three decades ago. Charlie's dream is so powerful that it makes her accept the writing job and a three-month-long visit to the bayou country of southern Louisiana. 

     The book is divided into four sections. The first and last are set in Stamford, Connecticut, where Charlie currently resides. The middle two sections are set in on the Deveau estate in Chicory, Louisiana. There, Charlie moves into a small cottage on the estate grounds and meets the members of the spectacularly dysfunctional Deveau family and their staff. As she investigates the case, she develops close relationships with two men: Remy Minot, a local police detective who has been assigned to reopen the investigation of Gabriel's disappearance, and Noah Palmer, a Texas landscaper hired by Hettie Deveau, the dying family matriarch, to restore the estate gardens to their former glory. One becomes her friend and ally, and the other becomes her lover.

     Young has created a Southern Gothic novel that drips with atmosphere: "The trees thicken, forming a dense canopy. Spanish moss drapes down, gloomy and majestic...The swamp creeps closer and closer...The silence is, to a city dweller, unearthly. No birds, no rushing water. Only stillness. I...gaze at the green-brown water. There's a smell I don't like, a dank and almost moldy odor, like someone's leaky basement." When she reaches the gated estate, she sees the white-pillared, French-windowed house "waiting at the end of the drive, lovely and white, half shielded by the trees. An elegant, expectant ghost of a home." In a scene set inside the Deveau mansion, someone pulls the drapes open to let in some light, "but the study's dark and somber furnishings expertly fend off natural light. It is a room for migraine-ridden women, scholars burning the midnight oil, grave old white men weighing matters of political and economic import." 

    The Deveau siblings are a disagreeable lot: twin sisters—one stridently dissatisfied with her life and the other smug and pretentious—and their in-the-closet older brother, who runs the family hotel business. All of them are harboring secrets, some harmless and some devastating, and it's up to Charlie to dig deep enough to bring those secrets into the light—an intense and sometimes dangerous task.

     As Charlie narrates her way through her investigation and her love life, we get to know her in a very personal way—her grief over Keegan's death, the big shift in her feelings of distrust for close friendships, and her blossoming emotions as she begins to fall in love. When she thinks about Keegan, she grieves, "No one told me then, He's yours, for four years. He's yours, but not for long. I am not by nature an optimistic or hopeful person, but when I held my child, I believed absolutely in the future. His future." All through the book, Charlie wrestles with her beliefs about the role of God and the ramifications of religious faith. She meets Justine, a religious woman who has lost her daughter, Didi, and wonders "How can you pray to a God…who is so unfair? How can you look in Didi's empty bedroom and see any reason, any purpose? It isn't a rhetorical question—I really want to know the answer. Justine told me that prayer gives her comfort, but I can't imagine seeking solace from the being who orchestrated my misery."

     Charlie is a richly drawn protagonist, always alert to the everyday details of life. For example, when she and Noah stop at a local restaurant, they are waited on by a puffy-eyed, hung-over teenager "who has a faraway look like she's mentally composing a suicide note." (Haven't we all met that waitress?) When Charlie stops in at the local library to do some research, "The gray-haired woman at the reference desk…wears a purple turtleneck with a garish studded snowflake pin that only a teacher, librarian, or grandmother would find attractive." (Yes, that can be construed as a stereotypical statement, but still…I know exactly what that pin looks like.)

     But there is a major problem with most of the people with whom she interacts: very few of them are telling the whole truth about themselves, and some are telling outright lies. Young does a masterful job with her plotting, keeping the reader in deep suspense all the way up to the final scene. Although I made some close guesses about the truth of the kidnapping—which is at the heart of the plot—many aspects of the final resolution surprised me.

     On the downside, Young wraps up that resolution a bit too neatly. It's hard to imagine—even in a tiny bayou town—that in the face of the deadly final events, most of the details are kept hidden from public knowledge and from law enforcement. But that didn't bother me as much as, perhaps, it should because I truly enjoyed every page-turning scene, from beginning to end.

     Young gives us a haunting, sometimes heartbreaking, tale in which her smart and adventurous heroine follows her dreams as she introduces us to a wealth of quirky characters and ferrets out chilling answers to dark questions that have been kept secret for thirty long years. As one reviewer has written, "Eerie and haunting, the novel is as addictive as mint juleps served by servants in white gloves on the veranda—and just as creepy." This is a terrific debut novel from an up-and-coming author. Its mix of eerie Gothic and ghostly elements, amateur sleuth and whodunit tropes, moral and religious issues, murder, and betrayal will grab you by the throat from the very beginning and take you on a wild ride through the bayous. 

  Here are some links to interviews with and guest blogs by the author on the subject of this novel:

     > Click HERE to read an interview on the Shelf Awareness web site. 

     > Click HERE to read Young's guest blog on Dead Good Books.

     > Click HERE to read Young's interview with Publishers Weekly. 

     > Click HERE to read Young's interview with Shelf-Awareness. 

UPDATE! Christine Feehan: CARPATHIAN/DARK SERIES

UPDATE!

I have just updated an ongoing post for Christine Feehan's CARPATHIAN/DARK SERIES with a review of Dark Ghost, the 27th novel in the series.

Click on the pink-link series title above to go directly to the new review.

Kim Harrison: PERI REED CHRONICLES

Author:  Kim Harrison  
Series:  PERI REED CHRONICLES 

Plot Type:   Near-Future Thriller 

Ratings:  Violence—4; Sensuality—2; Humor—2   
Publisher and Titles:  Gallery Books (Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
          "Sideswiped" (introductory story, 8/2015)
          The Drafter (novel, 9/2015)

          The Operator (11/2016)   

This post was revised and updated on 12/3/2016 to include a review of The Operator, the second novel in the series. That review appears first, followed by an overview of the world-building and reviews of the introductory novella and the first novel. 

          FAIR WARNING!          

     Do NOT read my review of The Operator until after you read     

  The Drafter because it contains serious spoilers for the first novel.     

                         NOVEL 2: The Operator                        

PUBLISHER'S BLURB: 

     On-the-run ex-agent Peri Reed returns bigger and bolder than ever in this second highly anticipated installment in Kim Harrison's new suspense trilogy, THE PERI REED CHRONICLES.

    Peri Reed’s job eats her mind, but for a special task agent in hiding, forgetting the past can be a blessing. Betrayed by the man she thought she loved and the agency who turned her into the very thing she fought against, Peri abandoned the wealth and privilege of Opti for anonymity riddled with memory gaps and self-doubt. But when a highly addictive drug promises to end her dependency on those who’d use her as a tool for their own success, she must choose to remain broken and vulnerable, or return to the above-the-law power and prestige she once left: strong but without will—for whoever holds her next fix, will hold her loyalty. Yet even now as then, a love based on lies of omission might still save her life.

MY REVIEW: 

     As the novel opens, Peri is running a coffee shop that is located over an old illegal medical dump. The residual contamination from the dump covers up the radiation signal from the chip that Peri's former handler and current enemy injected into her body. She is always on the lookout for trouble because she knows that her former handler, Bill Heddles, will never give up on dragging her back into the "business." All Peri wants (or so she keeps telling herself) is as normal a life as a drafter can have—free of mind manipulation and memory wiping and free of all of the people—mostly men—who lied to her for all of the years she worked for Opti, the United States' clandestine special ops program. At the top of her enemy list, right alongside Bill, is Jack Twill, her long-time anchor (and lover) who turned out to be her biggest betrayer.

     Since the demise of Opti, Bill has been working for a group headed by a mysterious, wealthy woman named Helen Yeomon. Helen has had chemists working on a drug called the Accelerator that will "chemically destroy the synapses that cause you to forget a draft." In order to keep the drafters under her control, she and Bill have had the chemists concoct an addictive drug called Evocane that must be taken before the Accelerator. Since Helen and Bill control all access to both drugs, this means that any drafter who takes the Evocane becomes totally dependent on them for their next fix. Without regular and frequent doses of Evocane, the drafter would become permanently psychotic. "And that, of course, was the control. They had only to withhold the maintenance drug and she'd do whatever they wanted...She'd be a tool, a piece of ammo. Whoever held the source of that [Evocane] held the power, not her...They had a cure. It would make her perfect but would turn her into a slave."

    Meanwhile, the government has its own covert group, the World Enumeration Federal Taskforce (aka WEFT), led by a cold-hearted man named Mr. Steiner. WEFT is rounding up drafters who are still not locked up in mental hospitals. Basically, that very small group comprises Michael Kord, who has hooked up with Bill and Helen, and Peri, who doesn't plan to hook up with anyone. Michael is a psychotic drafter who is determined to get rid of Peri so that he can be the first one to be injected with the Accelerator. Also in the mix are the other three men in Peri's life:

> Jack Twill, the betrayer who has survived Peri's attempt to kill him at the end of the first novel and who has joined up with Bill;

> Dr. Silas Denier, the chemist who loves Peri and for whom Peri realizes she has fond feelings—although she can't remember exactly what their relationship has been (because Jack erased so many of her memories); and

> Allen Swift, a friend who seems to be looking out for Peri, but who sometimes changes sides without warning.

     The plot follows Peri as Steiner and Bill make repeated attempts to capture her. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they fail; and sometimes even when captured, she escapes. When she escapes, sometimes she is alone, sometimes she is with Jack, and sometimes she is with Silas. So...it's a run, run, run plot, with Peri in danger most of the time. Along the way, Peri picks up two people who start out as adversaries but become allies: Harmony Beam, a WEFT agent, and LD, an underworld drug dealer who discovers that he has a lot in common with Peri.

     Just as in the first novel, Harrison delves deep into Peri's emotions as she ponders the possibilities of actually taking the drugs and being able—for the first time in her life—to remember everything. She thinks about the addiction and the consequences of being at either Steiner's or Bill's mercy and she knows that she doesn't want that life, but deep down, she truly wants to know what it feels like to have a real memory of her life. In addition to missing her memories, Peri also misses the wealthy lifestyle she was accustomed to living during her years with Opti. Selling coffee to rich businessmen and women was never part of her life plan. "Peri...still found herself breathing in the expensive cologne of the suits she served as if it were a drug. She eyed their leather briefcases and high-end purses, knowing their cars were as shiny as the fob resting beside their state-of-the-art phones and tablets...She knew the simplicity she'd built around herself was a lie as she lured in everything she missed, all the while pretending she'd made a clean break from what she didn't want to be, what she couldn't be."

     The plot is suspenseful and action filled all the way through. Although we see most of the story from Peri's perspective, Harrison also includes a few chapters from the point of view of Jack, Bill, and Silas so we also get a peek into their mindsets as well.

     One of the quirky bits is that Silas has programmed Peri to see a hologram of Jack to use when she drafts without an anchor: "a structured mental scaffold designed and implanted to keep her from going insane when two conflicting timelines had been left to fester in her mind." The illusion is so complex and so intricately tied to her intuition, that whenever fake Jack gets antsy, Peri knows that trouble is near. Even as an hallucination, Jack is as snarky and narcissistic as he is in real life—always looking out for number one—himself—and always trying to inveigle his way back into Peri's good graces.

     This is another terrific chapter in a fascinating series. Peri is a strong and intelligent heroine who copes with her strange and dangerous lifestyle as best she can while dealing with heavy emotional stress from people who want to use her, control her, and—in Silas' case—love her. Although the whole concept of drafting and memory manipulation is complex, you soon learn to go with the flow of the story. But you MUST read the first novel before you read this one or you will be COMPLETELY lost. Trust me on this. 

     Click HERE to read or listen to an excerpt from The Operator on the novel's Amazon.com page where you can click on the cover art for print or on the "Listen" icon for audio.

                           WORLD-BUILDING                            

     In this explanation of the world-building, I quote heavily from Harrison's own descriptions because she does it better than I ever could. In a video interview, Harrison describes the series as a tech-heavy science fiction espionage thriller—Bourne Identity meets Minority Report, with the memory loss, betrayal, and government conspiracies of the first plus the multiple futures of the second.

     The series heroine, Peri Reed, is a drafter, a rare person who can alter time in very short intervals within a relatively small space: 10 to 60 seconds in an area no larger than a square mile or so, but usually much smaller—within a room or within the drafter's personal space. Peri's very first draft happened when she was five years old and broke her arm in a fall. In pain, she unknowingly went back in time a few seconds, replayed the scene, and kept herself from falling, thus preventing the broken arm. 

     The problem with drafting is that drafters remember what happened—the two timelines—only until time catches up with them. At that point, they cannot remember either the real past or the past they created to supersede the real past, so they become very confused. As a character explains in "Sideswiped," "They'd gone back twenty seconds, but every one of them would remember what had happened until time caught up and the drafters forgot." 

     In a podcast interview, Harrison explains the pros and cons of drafting: "Being able to manipulate time is a very strong gift, and there are strong drawbacks to balance that out. When Peri drafts, she loses not only the memory of the past she changes, but also the memory of the past she created, and if she’s unlucky, she’ll lose even more time—even weeks and months of her history...The anchors help the drafters remember the past they have forgotten." An anchor meshes his or her mind with the drafter's mind to manipulate and rebuild the drafter’s memory, and that's fine if the anchor is loyal to the drafter, but it's disastrous to the drafter if the anchor's loyalties lie elsewhere. The truth is, the anchor has complete control of the sanity of the drafter. 

     In an interview, Harrison explains that "the idea of a drafter who shifts time, and an anchor, who keeps the drafter sane after doing it, was born from the need to have limits. Peri was already going to be incredibly gifted in terms of kick-butt-attitude, and needing to depend upon someone to such a high degree to maintain her sanity helped balance that out. That this dependency is a lie, fostered by her employer to maintain control, gave me an opportunity for a lot of character growth." 

     As soon as drafters are spotted in the general population, they are singled out for special training by Opti, a covert government-supported organization that trains and hires drafters and anchors to carry out a range of assignments across the globe, some paid for by various government agencies and some by private interest groups. "Opti agents tweaked the present to set the future, and they had their fingers in everything from the development of soft fusion, to the legalization of replacement organs, to making sure U.S.-financed Finland made a manned landing on Mars before Putin." Opti constantly reinforces the idea that drafters must always be with their anchor when they draft, or risk getting caught up in a memory knot that could drive them into catastrophic memory-eclipsed paranoia (MEP), which usually ends with the drafter's suicide. Keeping the drafters always connected to their anchors allows Opti to control precisely which memories the drafters are allowed to keep and which are erased.

     For more of Harrison's thoughts about this series, here are some links to interviews and posts: 

   > Click HERE to read a conversation between Kim Harrison and Charlaine Harris about taking new fictional directions

    > Click HERE to read a guest blog by Harrison in which she lists nine fictional characters who were her inspiration as she created Peri Reed. 

    > Click HERE to go to Harrison's blog, where she offers several posts about the series.

    > Click HERE to listen to a 27-minute podcast interview in which Harrison discusses the series.

LINKS TO EXCERPTS:
For "Sideswiped": Click HERE and scroll down a bit to listen to an audio excerpt. 

For The Drafters:  Click HERE and scroll down to read the Prologue and the first two chapters on Harrison's web site. Click HERE to read chapter 3 on the RT Book Reviews blog.

     And finally, here is a fun fact about Peri's name from an interview with Harrison: "Peri’s name actually comes from Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who fought in the war of 1812 to secure the Great Lakes. After a mediocre career at sea, he valiantly won back from the British a small island chain in Lake Erie, Michigan. It allowed the American troops to retake Detroit, or Michigan might belong to Canada today….Using Commodore Perry’s name for my protagonist felt fitting. He’s the guy who said 'Don’t give up the ship!' and while that’s not Peri’s motto, she doesn’t give up anything, even a grudge."

     And just one more thing: The erased memory element in this series reminds me of Devon Monk's ALLIE BECKSTROM series in which the titular heroine also finds herself missing big chunks of time and writes notes to herself to try to fill in the gaps. Like Peri, Allie was also betrayed by someone close to her. Click HERE to read my reviews of the books in that excellent series.

                        INTRODUCTORY STORY .5:  "Sideswiped"                         

PUBLISHER'S BLURB: 
     Don’t miss this thrilling first look into the elite world of Peri Reed, government agency operative extraordinaire…

     Every hero, even the accidental ones, has a beginning. Silas’s radical theory that drafters are not replaying time as much as they are temporarily sliding into an alternate universe has never been well-received, but frankly, the darling of Opti’s research has enough clout not to care, until a professor with a grudge tries to put a permanent end to it. Love can’t alter time, and sometimes, even being able to rub out a single mistake isn't enough. 

MY REVIEW: 

     This 80-page introduction to Harrison's PERI REED CHRONICLES drops the reader directly into a futuristic, technology-driven world in which trained and talented drafters can alter time. The students in this story are all part of a training program by Opti. "Opti's students went on to the FBI, CIA, and mall security. It was only the top one percent who continued in the program to become Opti agents, and then one percent to them became the gods and goddesses of time." 

     In the opening scene, set in 2025, Peri Reed, the series heroine, misdirects a drone, which breaks through a window in a proctored college examination room and hits Dr. Silas Denier, a tech genius, in the head. Peri then gets caught when she is tripped up by one of the students as she grabs the drone and tries to escape. At that point, Peri (although we don't know yet that this is Peri), drafts—going five seconds back in time and replaying the scene, but in her new version of that brief piece of time, she jumps over that outstretched leg and makes a clean getaway. 

     We follow Silas through the rest of that night as he is called upon to monitor a final examination exercise in which two anchor/drafter pairs (one that includes his drafter girlfriend, Summer) vie with one another to gain access to a box of chocolates and then escape with their prize. But the evening goes terribly wrong, and all of the students are punished. When they try to avenge themselves on their teachers, the situation gets even worse, but this time the repercussions are deadly. 

     Although most of his superiors at Opti believe that drafters go backwards in time, Silas hypothesizes "that drafting time wasn't moving back as much as it was sideways. He'd had to invent most of the instruments to gather his data….He'd been at it for six years and had nothing to show but a handful of gadgets. If not for the versatility of the slick-suits and light pistols, his funding would have been cut years ago." The light-beams shot by Silas's pistols paralyze the part of the body that they hit. Silas invented them as part of his research, but Opti has weaponized them, and Silas is unhappy about that. 

     Reading this story is valuable in that it provides a taste of the series mythology, and it introduces three of the characters who will be at the heart of the series: Silas, Peri, and Allen. Pay attention to details as the characters interact because those will be clues to their personalities five years later when The Drafters begins. I am eagerly looking forward to reading The Drafter, which I will be picking up as soon as I put the period at the end of this sentence. 

                                   NOVEL 1:  The Drafter                                   

PUBLISHER'S BLURB: 

     Detroit 2030. Double-crossed by the person she loved and betrayed by the covert government organization that trained her to use her body as a weapon, Peri Reed is a renegade on the run. 

     Don’t forgive and never forget has always been Peri’s creed. But her day job makes it difficult: she is a drafter, possessed of a rare, invaluable skill for altering time, yet destined to forget both the history she changed and the history she rewrote. 

     When Peri discovers her name is on a list of corrupt operatives, she realizes that her own life has been manipulated by the agency. Her memory of the previous three years erased, she joins forces with a mysterious rogue soldier in a deadly race to piece together the truth about her fateful final task. Her motto has always been only to kill those who kill her first. But with nothing but intuition to guide her, will she have to break her own rule to survive? 

MY REVIEW: 

Here is a list of the main characters:

> Peri Reed: an elite, beautiful, highly talented drafter who is at the top of her profession, but then goes into a major skid

> Jack Twill: Peri's handsome, blond anchor, whom she loves dearly and trusts implicitly (at first)

> Bill Heddles: Peri's handler at Opti, who may or may not be corrupt

> Dr. Silas Denier: a tech genius we met in "Sideswiped," who now works for the alliance and who has a history with Peri

> Fran Jaquard: the head of the alliance (introduced at the very end of "Sideswiped")

> Allen Swift: Peri and Silas' college friend, an anchor who works for Opti (also a character in "Sideswiped")

     The novel has two primary conflicts: the conflict between Opti and the alliance (a group of drafters and anchors who are opposed to Opti's dishonest and murderous agenda) and the conflict between Peri and all of the untrustworthy people in her life. As the series begins, Peri believes that Opti acts for the good of the world, but does it? At the beginning of The Drafters, Peri has been working for Opti for five years. She and her current anchor, Jack Twill, are lovers (as is the usual case with drafters and anchors) and have been together for three years. She trusts him completely to anchor her through her drafts and to defragment (aka defrag) her memories after each draft is completed. Here is Peri's description of their teamwork: "Holding the world together while a new timeline formed was her job. Witnessing and rebuilding her memory was his job…"

     As the story begins, Peri and Jack have sneaked into a plush corporate office to steal some computer files. When they are interrupted, events occur that cause Peri's intuition to interfere with Jack's memory defrag, which usually brings her back to normal—well, as "normal" as Peri ever gets. This time, she loses three months of memory, but she begins to have fragmentary flashes of memories that should have been erased. Part of that remembered knowledge is that her name is on a list of agents who are corrupt. Peri has given her life to Opti, so she is shocked and hurt that they believe that she is disloyal, and she vows to clear her name no matter what it takes. In the next few chapters, Peri's wonderfully secure, exciting, well-paid life disintegrates as she learns that the very people she has loved and trusted for years have betrayed her. Now, she has to construct a whole new "normal" for herself, and she isn't sure that there is anyone she can trust. 

    The problem is, whenever Peri drafts, she loses memories. And in several instances, Opti wipes away huge chunks of her memory—at one point, three whole years. So, if Peri learns in one scene that a character is corrupt or dangerous, she loses that memory as soon as she either drafts or gets a memory swipe. She keeps a diary and writes notes on her hands to remind her, but nothing really works. She is at the mercy of any anchor who can manipulate her mind. At one point, she compares herself to an Etch a Sketch: "Don't like what you see? Give me a good shake, and write what you want." For much of this book, Peri is a victim, but she fights victimization every step of the way. Her motto is "I don't kill anyone who doesn't kill me first." That means that if a person deals her a death blow (and this does happen—more than once), she instantly drafts back to before she is killed and alters events to make sure that her killer dies and that she lives. Peri's kill-you-if-you-kill-me mantra plays a key role in the plot of this book. 

     Reading this book is like carefully opening a package covered with many, many layers of wrapping. As each layer is peeled away, Peri's life changes because her memories are constantly being altered. Almost half-way though the book, new information suddenly appears in the narrative—information that stopped me dead in my tracks. From that point on, information from the characters' pasts is woven through present events, combining to make a plot that contains a surprising twist or turn in every single chapter. (The big one at the end of the book is a real shocker! Please don't read the ending first—you'll hate yourself if you do!) 

     Harrison has said that the series has a strong personal thread that that pays attention to relationships and how they move us and motivate us. As that thread expands, Peri is torn apart mentally and emotionally (and sometimes physically) by each side—Opti and the alliance—and she is desperate for someone to trust—but who? All her life she has been told that she can never be alone, but now she is alone. Will she lose her mind? Can she survive on her own? Is there anyone she can trust? (At one point, she writes on her hand, "Trust no one.") Many of the scenes are heartbreaking as Peri has breakthroughs in her attempt to regain normalcy, but then has her memories altered yet again, thereby losing all of the new information she has learned and all of momentum she has built up. Even the reader doesn't always know who is the good guy and who is the bad guy as more and more details pile up on both sides of the equation. Harrison has hinted that in the next two novels, Peri will discover ways in which to deal with her memory losses. It will be extremely interesting to see how that plays out. 

     Harrison tells the story in the third-person voice from multiple viewpoints, mostly Peri's. Some of the chapters are narrated solely from Silas's perspective as he wrestles with his mixed feelings for Peri and tries to decide which side he will choose in this unfolding adventure. At this point in his life, Silas has no illusions that either Opti or the alliance is a "good" organization. He sees both as corrupt, self-serving and extremely dangerous, and he wants nothing to do with either of them. "He was not an agent. He was a designer, a tinkerer, an innovator whose playground was where the surety of electronics met the vagaries of the human mind. And they wanted him to run a maze like one of his rats?" The alliance "was made up of renegade Opti personnel who believed the government shouldn't control the ability to manipulate time…They worked in the shadows funded by benefactors…It was exchanging one power-hungry boss for another as far as Silas was concerned." 

     This futuristic world is filled with technological innovations: cars with solar-gathering paint that keeps their batteries charged, wafer-thin glass phones, holographic touch-screens, and droneway paths for delivery and recreational drones. The technology is primarily in the background—it's just part of life in the new Detroit, which has been rebuilt into an aesthetically pleasing city with "defined pockets of clean industry, commerce, and housing,…connected…with green relief and quiet transport all layered over the original foundry steel."

     This is a terrific new series with an introductory novel that I absolutely loved. Don't be put off by the sci-fi label. Yes, the story has elements of sci-fi, but also threads of romance, mystery, and suspense. Trust the author of the beloved HOLLOWS to present us with another complex, gutsy, smart, unstoppable heroine. I predict that Peri Reed will become just as iconic as Rachel Morgan. Peri's search for the truth of her life is as heartbreakingly poignant as Rachel's search for love and belonging. In this book, Harrison gives us her usual masterful plotting and nuanced characters, along with the mind-boggling inventiveness of this futuristic, tech-based world. The story moves along at such a fast pace that I could hardly turn the pages fast enough. A confession: I started reading The Drafter after dinner, and kept reading all night, finishing it at about 5:00 A.M. (thankfully I didn't have to get up and go to work the next day). I do recommend that you read the novella first to acquaint yourself with the drafter/anchor relationship and with the main core of characters. 

END NOTE: Harrison has said that "The Drafter is my commentary on Alzheimer’s disease and those afflicted with it, being erased day by day, and their heavy dependency on first their intuition and patterns to hide the breaks, and their eventual and utter dependency upon those they loved to keep them to the person they were. That’s what Peri Reed is about…" This perspective on the story is made achingly poignant in the Epilogue of this book (and, again, please don't read the ending first).