Review: The Ripple Effect

THE RIPPLE EFFECT
Rhiannon's Law #3
J.A. Saare
Adult Urban Fantasy
240 pages
Mundania Press
Available Now
Received from author for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
There is always a price to pay…

Rhiannon Murphy visited the future, witnessed hell on earth and made choices to change things for the greater good. Unfortunately there are consequences for her actions, the penalties for her interference possibly more than she can bear. Determined to sever her debt with a fallen angel, she pushes everything aside, focusing on locating Marigold Vesta’s resting place.

Until death comes knocking at her door.

When Disco’s maker arrives in New York, he resents Rhiannon on a level she can’t begin to comprehend. Yet Marius isn’t her most dangerous adversary, not by a long shot. Marius’s sire -- a half-demon -- is determined to see the necromancer who stunned the vampire world on her knees. If she won’t bend, he’ll do everything in his power to make her break. No price is too high, meaning no one is safe -- including Disco and Paine.

Dealt a blow from which she can never recover, Rhiannon turns to the only person who can help her: the fallen angel who is relying on Rhiannon to save her soul. Bartering with a creature from Heaven is probably just as dangerous as starting a war with a demon from Hell, but with nothing to lose it’s no longer about life or death.

It’s about getting even.

MY THOUGHTS
The Ripple Effect is one of those stories that sends a shudder of unease through us from the opening chapter, a sense of foreboding entering through our fingertips where they touch the pages and traveling like liquid lightening through our bloodstream until our entire bodies feel a darkly anticipatory weight settle in. It's with nerves on edge that we continue Rhiannon's story, subtle and not-so subtle hints of bad things to come causing us to shift uncomfortably in our seats, waiting with breath held for the pain we know is waiting for us around a not-too distant bend. Rhiannon's world is brutal and unforgiving, and Ms. Saare never wastes an opportunity to detail just how cutthroat it can be, but we know that while she'll let us ride the razor's edge and bloody ourselves again and again, she'll never let us completely fall off, providing us the comfort of a helping hand just as we start to precariously teeter.

Rhiannon has always been a highlight of this series, her no-nonsense attitude and abundance of sarcasm combining with a violent past and innate vulnerability to give us a stunningly chaotic young woman with a jumble of traits and faults that add up to one exquisitely human whole. In this latest installment, Rhiannon's imperfections are thrust into the spotlight, a past history of looking out only for herself and being the sole bearer of the repercussions of her actions proving to have created in her a fatal flaw given her initiation into a large vampire family. For most of this story she's unable to fully grasp what having a family means, and she continues on her lonely road with eyes straight ahead as she has every day before, all the while failing to expand her line of sight to see how her footsteps affect those on the periphery.

By the time her tunnel vision clears, unstoppable events are set in motion, ones that painfully and heart-wrenchingly school Rhiannon in the ways of the vampire world. Each book in this series has Rhiannon learning a hard lesson in the hardest way possible, her soft spots not just poked, but punched again and again until she's battered and bloody, though never beaten. One of the things we can't help but love most about Rhiannon is her ability to own her mistakes and take the fallback unflinchingly, recognizing the decisions that led her to her current predicament and stepping up to receive the blow physically, emotionally, or in the case of this third installment, both.

Overall, The Ripple Effect is a challenging read in that it tests our boundaries as readers, forcing us to evaluate whether we're strong enough to traverse this world with Rhiannon or if it's simply more than we can bear. The first half suggests the latter, the darkness looming on the horizon like a poisonous snake coiling in our guts ready to strike at any moment, but the second half, after a red haze of pain clears, gives us strength in the form of a Rhiannon with renewed purpose. Her determination to see her mistakes remedied and her debts paid in full fills us with hope that the end of her journey, whenever that may be, will see her with wounds healed and happiness etched in every one of her features.

Rating: 4.5/5

Review: The Renfield Syndrome

THE RENFIELD SYNDROME (Rhiannon's Law #2)
J.A. Saare
Urban Fantasy
e-book
Available Now
Received from author for review

Warning: Contains spoilers from Dead, Undead, or Somewhere in Between.

THE STORY
Rhiannon should have known better than to enter into negotiations with a demon, even if she was trying to help vampire boyfriend Disco. Now she's one hundred and one years in the future with scarily few ideas on how to return to her own time. All she knows is she needs to get a message to Disco per the demon's request in order to settle the debt he owed, and given his immortality, she should be able to find him in this future world.

Before she can set out in search of Disco, Rhiannon finds herself intercepted by a team of black-clad men with sizable weaponry and is forcibly escorted to their compound. Here, she's informed majority of the human population has been wiped out by something called The Renfield Syndrome, and those who aren't dead are in servitude to the vampires who have taken over.

Rhiannon eventually convinces their leader, Carter, to aid her in her search for Disco while repeatedly spurning his advances, but what she finds in this new future threatens to destroy her. With the help of some old friends, Rhiannon struggles through the numbness of her new reality but vows to return to her time and prevent this future from ever coming to pass.

MY THOUGHTS
The Renfield Syndrome is a challenging read, not in the sense it’s difficult to understand or navigate, but in the way it affects us emotionally, forcing us to face events and situations along with Rhiannon that turn us inside out and lay us uncomfortably bare with our soft underbellies blatantly exposed. Ms. Saare, though it’s crystal clear how important her characters are to her, is not the type to write a story in which she’s content to hold our hand by following up tragic events with soothing words and meaningless murmurs that everything will work out as it’s supposed to. Instead, she allows things to unfold in ways that are painful and raw and have us walking away from Rhiannon’s tale just to seek brief sanctuary in our reality, but ultimately we are forced to return and put our hands back in the fire for the simple reason we cannot bear to allow Rhiannon to face it alone. Despite being the product of simple letters put together to form words and then sentences, the characters and world are undeniably tangible and our experiences with them far more real than vicarious in nature.

Rhiannon is the same smart-mouthed woman we met and fell in love with in Dead, Undead or Somewhere in Between, her no-nonsense attitude making the 101 year leap through time with no difficulty. What is so appealing about Rhiannon is the vulnerability thriving beneath the tough exterior, her skin able to be punctured as easily as anyone else’s if one knows just where to strike. Her body’s haunted topography of puckered scars serves as a reminder to us of both her unbelievable strength but also her weakness, and we watch in horror in this installment as the one person trusted with this physical map to her soul betrays her more intimately than the repeated violations responsible for the marks themselves. Our hearts belong entirely to Rhiannon in this tale, her pain ours as we suffer together.

Introduced to us in this alternative future Rhiannon finds herself in is another love interest, a man we’ve met before and adored but whom we never thought a romantic threat. Ms. Saare manages to beautifully avoid the petty drama that often surrounds a love triangle (though that hardly seems a fitting term for this particular situation), elevating it out of the superficial stages of a dual attraction to two men and plunging us head first into the depths of pain, love, and torment all heartbreakingly combined into something we never expected. While we might tell ourselves Rhiannon’s choices are wrong and her decision to act as she does misguided, the entire situation is written in a way that makes her relationship with this newest man feel so disconcertingly right that we find any anger we’ve mustered melt away in a haze of confusion. We are left with a churning mess of an emotional reservoir, one that begins to spill over the edges and drown us in torn allegiances as we struggle to separate the chaos into recognizable feelings.

The Renfield Syndrome will be a story that many will love but is also one that will most likely give many a reader pause, Rhiannon’s actions and the actions of those around her creating a visceral and gritty reading experience. This is not a story we walk away from feeling light and happy, rather we carry the emotional weight of it for weeks after reading. Ms. Saare isn’t afraid to leave a mark on her characters or her readers, and even as we wallow in pain wishing she would make it stop, we silently thank her for drawing us in so deeply.

Rating: 4.5/5

Review: Dead, Undead, or Somewhere in Between

DEAD, UNDEAD, OR SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
J.A. Saare
Urban Fantasy
244 pages
Eternal Press
Available Now

THE STORY
Rhiannon Murphy is a necromancer, disturbed on a daily basis by ghosts still bearing the gruesome markings of their violent deaths when they occasionally pop into her line of vision as she goes about her daily routine. Aside from her unique ability, her life is pretty simple. Her job as a bartender isn't much, but she's in control of it and every other aspect of her existence. She'll never let someone else be in control again.

Unfortunately, her life doesn't seem to want to remain simple, and she is doggedly hounded at work by Disco, a vampire who seeks her assistance. Several of his brethren have gone missing in the span of a few weeks and it seems Rhiannon's necromancy is even more rare than she imagined: she not only sees the dead, but the twice-dead as well, able to contact vampires that have died the permanent death.

Though reluctant to clutter her life with complicated entanglements, she agrees to help Disco figure out what's happened to members of his vampire family, teaming up with a fellow necromancer to combine their gifts and find an undead murderer. As if hunting down a serial killer isn't enough of a distraction, Rhiannon also finds herself uncomfortably attracted to Disco, his subtle charm wreaking havoc on her defenses and chipping away at the death grip she maintains on her sense of control. Control is vital to Rhiannon, and as much as she fears that which is destroying the vampires, she finds Disco may perhaps be both a bigger threat than the killer and also a chance at a happiness that has evaded her her entire life.

MY THOUGHTS
Dead, Undead, or Somewhere in Between is a delicious surprise full of multifaceted characters who refuse to be anything less than their true selves, and a story pulsing with action but not so complex as to be difficult to follow. Reading this story is like attending opening night at a performance that has garnered positive reviews, but yet we don't entirely know what to expect until the curtain rises, or in this case the first page is turned, and we find ourselves pleasantly shocked and absolutely engrossed by the richness of the experience. While the vampirism and necromancy are nothing groundbreaking, we are granted access to characters who are damaged but mending admirably, with histories that would render lesser people useless, their minds shattered and broken by an unfathomable cruelty. We are instantly involved and irrevocably bound to the protagonists from the start, a relationship forming in the blink of an eye and deepening with every turn of the page.

Rhiannon is blunt, crude, and has the mouth of the most well-versed of sailors, and though her language and demeanor might be off-putting to those around her (as intended at times), we have little choice but to find her refreshing, coming to appreciate her no-nonsense attitude and tough-girl exterior. Her foul language and thick skin protect her from those who might try to breach her defenses and exert any sort of control over her, whether physical or emotional. She has a brutal past, one all the more disturbing due to her refusal to speak or think of it, allowing our own minds to fill in the gaps with images more, or perhaps less, horrifying than her truth. Though she's strong, she's not so overwhelming in her brashness as to push us away as easily as she does those around her. Little glimpses of vulnerability peek through every now and again, giving us enough of a connection to feel protective of her as we both admire her fortitude and long for one or two of her walls to crumble so Disco may take up permanent residence behind her carefully constructed facade.

Disco, for all the flamboyance of his moniker, is blissfully unassuming; a vampire that doesn't throw off testosterone in blanketing waves or seek to assert his alpha male dominance through presumption or possession, instead displaying an understated nature that is certainly no less masculine for it's reserved quality. He's not the type to be cool and calculating, merely biding his time until the object of his affection succumbs to his roguish charms, approaching Rhiannon instead with patience and control, and treating her with a reverence more effective in winning both her heart and ours than a persistent, undaunted pursuit could ever be. He doesn't want mere capitulation, he wants a trust he's earned, and he's content to maintain a comfortable distance until she's ready to give it. Their chemistry is undeniable, the quiet build up of it resulting in a more cataclysmic romantic pairing, one that burns bright enough to singe away the remnants of a nightmarish past, and hot enough to fuse together open wounds with an unmatched tenderness and mutual affection.

The story moves forward at a perfect pace, slow in parts that bear explanation and lightening-quick when the pursuit of our villain becomes vitally important. We are left with an ending that forces us to adopt a few choice words from Rhiannon's extensive vocabulary as a piece of Disco's own history makes an inopportune appearance, and I cannot wait for the next installment to see how this last-minute development will play out.

Rating: 4.5/5