 |
| Vicious Circle |
I am so glad that Carey wrote another book in this series! And that it came out so soon after I got my hands on the first book. The first book, which I reviewed earlier, was The Devil You Know. Vicious Circle picks up a couple of months after the events of the first. This one was a little less violent than The Devil You Know, but it was just as interesting and, possibly more disturbing than that debut novel.
As in The Devil You Know, our hero starts out with two cases that, at first glance, don’t look like they have anything to do with each other. Castor is asked to find the ghost of a young girl by her parents. Then, he is asked to consult on a case for a demon who apprenticed under him until she could get certified as an exorcist. Plus, there are a couple of loup-garous on his tail, inexplicably trying to keep him from finding the girl’s ghost.
When I started to read The Devil You Know, I had some doubts about an author who had gotten his start writing graphic novels. But Vicious Circle in particular is packed with mood- and scene-setting language, and details that make the whole story richer. I really believe that Carey did his homework, because there are scraps of Latin and a lot of Greek, details about magic and history, and a general plausibility that helped keep me in the story. I love it when authors use facts and scraps of the truth to make their stories believable. It hooks me every time.
I started reading this book yesterday, and I had a hard time putting it down. I was totally hooked from the first chapter and didn’t manage to put it down until 2:00 in the morning. Good job I started the book on a Saturday. I’m also glad that I managed to pick this book up after I had read the first, because I would have been pretty lost. Carey is very good at explaining things without sounding like he’s explaining (one of my pet peeves in books is when a character or a narrator starts discoursing about history or philosophy or sociology and brings the plot to a screeching halt). But you need to start at the beginning in order to get the whole story.