Happy New Year Darlings! Was your New Year’s Eve fun and exciting or relaxing and hopeful? Mine was spent hanging out in a hotel room in Arizona digging into a delicious new book! {I also spent some time writing out my New Year’s resolutions}.
My pal Sheila from Book Journey is hosting a unique link-up for this special first day of 2015 ~ “First Book of the Year”
For the momentous occasion I chose Things Half in Shadow by Alan Finn. A little mystery/thriller, supernatural happenings, historical detail and Civil War aftermath. . .so much packed into one promising read!
The year is 1869, and the Civil War haunts the city of Philadelphia like a stubborn ghost. Mothers in black continue to mourn their lost sons. Photographs of the dead adorn dim sitting rooms. Maimed and broken men roam the streets. One of those men is Edward Clark, who is still tormented by what he saw during the war. Also constantly in his thoughts is another, more distant tragedy–the murder of his mother at the hands of his father, the famed magician Magellan Holmes…a crime that Edward witnessed when he was only ten.
Now a crime reporter for one of the city’s largest newspapers, Edward is asked to use his knowledge of illusions and visual trickery to expose the influx of mediums that descended on Philadelphia in the wake of the war. His first target is Mrs. Lucy Collins, a young widow who uses old-fashioned sleight of hand to prey on grieving families. Soon, Edward and Lucy become entwined in the murder of Lenora Grimes Pastor, the city’s most highly regarded–and by all accounts, legitimate–medium, who dies mid-seance. With their reputations and livelihoods at risk, Edward and Lucy set out to find the real killer, and in the process unearth a terrifying hive of secrets that reaches well beyond Mrs. Pastor.Blending historical detail with flights of fancy, Things Half in Shadow is a riveting thriller where Medium and The Sixth Sense meet The Alienist —and where nothing is quite as it seems …
Do share ~ what are you reading this first day of 2015?!?