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