Book Review – Kindred Spirit
Author: John Passarella
Publisher: Pocket Star
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: May 2006
John Passarella is the Bram Stoker award-winning author and co-author of the popular WITHER series of books, as well as BUFFY and ANGEL tie-in novels. However, his latest release is all his own, neither a tie-in nor collaboration.
KINDRED SPIRIT is a supernatural thriller about identical twins connected beyond death and a violently deranged criminal with an unquenchable thirst for revenge. It is on the first anniversary of the brutal murder of Hallie Moore’s sister, Heather, when a memorial visit to the site of the unsolved homicide reawakens Hallie’s childhood feeling of inner communication with her sibling. Hallie is in the midst of turmoil at her job in television news, and Heather’s four year-old son, Shane, and widowed husband, Tom, are just surviving day-to-day when Heather, through Hallie, seems like she’s returned to all their lives.
Based on the book jacket and beginning chapters, I think a reader will intuit what’s occurring long before Hallie does, even though having once shared telepathy with her sister, she might have figured out this phantasmic cohabitation sooner. Waiting for her to catch the drift made the first half of the book feel a little slow to me, and her interaction with the police seemed unnecessarily uneventful. The TV news scenes were probably the most engaging, because Passarella’s obviously detailed research came out in other than exposition, driven by real conflicts and interesting characters at NBN-7. However, for an intensely involved party and professional busybody, Hallie seems frustratingly easy to dissuade from investigating, deciding frequently to delay looking behind doors or making phone calls until later.
I’d have enjoyed jumping through the preliminaries faster, and thinning out the focus on the trivialities of normal life, because once the weirdness gets humming in high gear, skin-crawling events take place that I thought deserved increased attention. The kinds of scenes fomenting between Hallie, her family members dead and alive, and what we suspect from early on may be yet another entity would send many of us screaming for the therapist’s couch. The twins’ mother alone deserves her own segment on a daytime talk show. However, plot developments I found incredibly creepy, including the revelation of the barbarically shocking nature of Heather’s death, seem accepted by all with little resistance, reflection, or self-recrimination. As a reader, I would’ve happily dug in deeper with all of that tangled mess.
Still, Heather’s murderer is elaborated as a truly bad and twisted pretzel, the kind of psycho it might require otherworldy assistance to conquer, and when he begins raining new misery on the already damaged family, he’s up to the stuff of nightmares. KINDRED SPIRIT is a haunting suspense for those who keep their families close and their dearly departed even closer.
About Clare: New York area writer
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.