Be He Ghost Or Be He Real? That’s The Question In Harper Fox’s “Kitto”

“But the pain of love are the pains of life, and a lifelong love it will be.” – Harper Fox

Author: Harper Fox

Publisher: Self-Published

Pages/Word Count: 123 Pages

Rating: 5 Stars

Blurb: Now Lee is free from the malevolent ghost of Morris Hawke, his clairvoyant gifts are expanding fast. Too fast for comfort, and he and Gideon find themselves wrestling with his unsettling capacity to see the future. In some ways this new power is wonderful, and Lee finds himself a local hero after predicting a flood.

But there’s one aspect he can’t bear, and that’s the blind spot he sees when he thinks about the wedding plans he and Gideon have started to make. It’s as if this event, which he wants more than life, simply isn’t going to happen. He’s troubled and stressed out, and Gideon decides to intervene, whisking him off to an isolated creek-side cabin in the mysterious Cornish ria country. All is peaceful there, and the clamour in Lee’s head subsides. It’s time for companionship, peace, good food and plenty of sex…

Then a young man wanders out of the woods and turns their blissed-out retreat into chaos. Kitto is harmless – a charming drifter, very handsome. To Gideon he’s just a kid, flesh and blood and a bit of a nuisance. But Lee reacts with horror. Since when can Gideon – Lee’s rock, his connection to the real world and sanity – see ghosts?

Mysterious midsummer is rising in the deep green Cornish countryside, and as the village gears up for the eerie Golowan festival, Lee and Gideon face their toughest case yet: a battle between the real and spirit worlds that threatens to tear their own apart.

Review: That moment you devour the last available book in a series and have no idea when, or even if, another one is coming—we’ve all been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. It’s a thing. Series Hangover Is Tangible. In other words, S-H-I… Well, you get the picture.

How much love and mystery and tradition and emotion does Harper Fox deliver in Kitto, the fourth—and hopefully not the last!—book in the Tyack and Frayne series? All of it. What was meant to have been a romantic getaway for Gid and Lee turns into yet another enigmatic journey through a turn in the pagan wheel, when Midsummer brings danger and drama to an already dramatic Golowan day celebration and the meeting of the oak and holly kings.

Gid had best start believing in ghost stories, because he’s in one. Or, at least he’s in a close facsimile of one when a young man, who may or may not be real, takes the voyeuristic approach to introducing himself to Lee and Gideon—but in his defense, they were participating in a little public display of…err…everything. Is he corporeal or merely a product of Lee’s abilities? The author weaves that question into the plot and in doing so to perfection, nearly tears Gid and Lee apart at the point where their bond has evolved into something powerful and glorious. Kitto’s sudden appearance in their relationship creates a rift between what Lee knows and what the copper in Gideon suspects, and it’s the doubt that makes for all the tension in this installment of the series.

Kitto is the boy who’d disappeared two years earlier, leaving behind a heartbroken stepbrother, Ray, a man Gid had inspired to leave behind his lawbreaking ways at the point he was most vulnerable, mourning Kitto’s loss. That grief wends its way into Gideon’s need to find answers to the questions surrounding Kitto’s disappearance, which prompts Gideon to start poking around a bit, his doubts pushing Lee away but bringing the truth close and a suspect closer to paying for his crime. There was so much emotion at the crux of this book, both the good kind that makes your heart beat a little faster, and the not so good kind that makes your heart feel as though it might seize up at any moment, and I loved the swing from one moment to the next.

As she’s done with the three previous books in the series, the author blends the supernatural with the season, bends the rules of reality to the point it becomes possible to believe in the impossible, and then wraps it all up at the end with a glimpse into the future. Zeke fulfills all my hopes by being the brother, not the minister, I’d hoped he would be, and I loved his austere self just a little more in this book. It’s a future that, after a struggle with psychic blindness, Lee appears to have seen into reality, and is a future I hope Harper Fox will see her way to delivering in a fifth book for me to love.

You can buy Kitto (Tyack & Frayne: Book Four) here: