Janet Lane Walters

TW: Child Abuse

Katherine Miller, a recent retiree, and Robespierre, a Maine Coon feline, live on the second floor of Katherine’s Victorian home. Sadly, an anticipated dinner and lovely evening at a neighbor’s home during a snowstorm did not come to fruition as a fall took Katherine to the hospital with a broken leg. Trying to be helpful, Katherine’s son Andrew found her a new tenant for the apartment on the first floor. Andrew shared the tenant’s name, Rachel Rodgers, and awareness that Rachel has 2 children. Katherine’s ill-at-ease feelings in not personally selecting her tenants will come back to haunt her and the neighbors too.

The characters are well-developed and become an exposé of everyone who meets Rachel Rodgers and how they respond to her personality, words, and actions.

Reviewer’s Note: In the location I discovered this novel, it is marketed as a cozy mystery. In my opinion, it is not a cozy mystery.… (mehr)

After Astrid's father suffers a stroke, she goes back home to take care of both him and his shop, Antiquities. There she meets Duncan Garrett, a man whom her father is helping to track down eight artifacts that connect him to a relative that mysteriously disappeared. Whenever Astrid touches one of these artifacts, she is transported into the past, to witness the mistakes made in a relationship. It soon becomes apparent that she and Duncan need to work together to break the curse that has been occurring again and again through time, but there are others who will try to interfere and get their own way. Through it all is the heat building between Astrid and Duncan. Is it just attraction, or could it be something more?

The premise of this book was actually an interesting one. The idea that patterns are repeated until one learns differently is one that I've never quite seen explored this way before. I must say, however, that eight examples of relationships got rather repetitive for me because I didn't feel as if the characters were making noteworthy progress in some of them. It felt like the same thing in a different civilization. Once the characters did start developing, I did start to enjoy it a good deal more.
The glimpses of other civilizations were interesting to me, with little details that helped me to get a feel for the time and some of the values. The wordings and dialogues that these vignettes were told in felt stiff and wooden at times in comparison to the voice that the contemporary scenes were told in, but once I acclimated to the change in voice it wasn't as noticeable.
Astrid also started to frustrate me as the book went on; she tells Duncan point blank that she knows what needs to happen to break the curses, and yet she then does the opposite of what needs to be done. It felt as if she kept switching back and forth between belief and disbelief of what she sees when she holds the artifacts.
I also wish that we could see what happens to the antagonists; when the book ends they are still left at large, with the implication that they will soon be caught. And yet, they have been the antagonists for thousands of years; a simple arrest not even shown feels like such an anticlimax.
The premise of this book was an interesting one, but I thought that a little bit of restructuring might have given it a lot more power. It was a fun read for me, but at the same time I couldn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to because of the repetition and the heroine. It was a great concept; I just think it could have used a bit more polish.… (mehr)