Alex DeVille is a reporter who got her first break reporting on a murder in the Satanic Panic era. Since then, all of her assignments have involved a paranormal and quite often a satanic connection. She wants to report on bigger stories, preferably some that don’t include satanic, occult, or paranormal elements, but that is what she is currently known and recognized for. When she gets the chance to secretly report on a group of nuns performing unauthorized exorcisms in In Italy, she jumps on it. Using some vacation time, she doesn’t tell her boss what she is up to, hoping that this story will be her big break and allow her to move to bigger stories that are not just more of the same: small occult-related stories. After all, demon possession isn’t real. It’s just someone who is mentally ill but has not properly been diagnosed as such, right?
I read a review copy of this book, and love how it ties in with the previous stories in this series. This is the fifth book in this series and I do recommend reading the previous books before this one as I think it adds something when you see how each book ties in with the other books in the series. Yes, you would likely still enjoy this one even without having read the previous books, but reading them in order definitely adds to the complexity of the overall story arc.
It was interesting reading this book and seeing the character be very subtly manipulated, and I’m not entirely certain if she ever even realized it was happening. This story does involve previous incarnations of several of the characters, and as such, I’m uncertain how much of what I call manipulation was actually the knowledge from their previous lives coming through as they were made aware of who they used to be, and what they saw as their purpose in the world.
This is a great series for those who enjoy dark tales involving occult forces. This book, as it did in book one, takes place in the 1980s, but as the main characters are not high school students, I did not expect there to be references to some of what I remember as a teenager growing up during that era, so I did not miss their exclusion in this book. I did enjoy the reference to phone cords, making it clear that the characters were not using mobile phones (which were only beginning to be available in the late 1980s.) And overall, I believe that the author did a very good job of portraying the time period accurately.
If you enjoy horror stories involving the occult, demonic forces, and the paranormal incidents set during in the 1980s, then I believe you will enjoy this book. But be warned, it does contain a fair amount of graphic sex, violence, murder, gore, drugs, alcohol, and even a rape. (I call it rape because while the character appeared to be a partially willing participant, her mind was not under her own control when it happened.) So this is definitely not a book meant for younger readers.
Amazon requires me to state that I have an Amazon Associates account that I use to generate the links to the books on their website. Purchasing something after following those links will earn a few pennies for me off the sale, though as of yet I have not earned anything from my Amazon Associate links.
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