Title: Boneyard
Series: The Thaumaturge: Book Two
Author: Cal Matthews
Publisher: Self-Published/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 228 Pages
Category: Spec Fic, Paranormal, Fantasy
At a Glance: This book is creepy, gross, and fantastic, and reinforced my love of the author’s knack for writing great word pictures.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Ebron White has never thought of himself as a murderer.
In fact, he’s always been the exact opposite – he has the power to raise the dead. But a fatal encounter with a murderous band of witches has changed his life, and left him with a whole host of problems.
Like his guilty conscience.
And the corpse hidden in his bathroom.
Together with his vampire boyfriend, Ebron is trying to get rid of the bodies and get his life back together. But his powers are starting to get attention – and Ebron and Leo may be facing bigger problems than either of them imagined.
Review: It’s official. I’m addicted to this series. Boneyard, book two in the Thaumaturgist series, begins a mere week after the end of The Dead, which is the perfect launching point. I’m a fan of no word count wasted on rehashing events that might’ve happened during a bigger time leap, so we get right back into the thick of things. That also means this book cannot be read as a standalone, as all the backstory for the events in Boneyard is in book one.
The gateway to Heckerson’s dark side is yawning, and an angel has fallen. Ebron White is a resurrectionist the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Christ beckoned Lazarus from the tomb. Ebron is a redeemer. Taking a life contradicts who he is and what he’s capable of, and he’s in an emotional tailspin over the moral gray area of his actions—is it possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons? And now Ebron has attempted a resurrection with less than successful results, which was so well portrayed that it was deliciously uncomfortable read. And now, Leo, Ebron’s vampire boyfriend, has disappeared—again—to find a way to dispose of the evidence of Ebron’s actions. The solution Leo comes up with is creepy, gross, and fantastic, and reinforced my love of this author’s knack for writing great word pictures.
To top it all off, Ebron is also being emotionally blackmailed to use his power in assistance to the Heckerson police and emergency medical services. Why should innocent people die when Ebron holds the gift of life in his very hands? The problem is that every resurrection takes a toll on his own physical being. Every single reanimation and soul restoration forces the reader to consider what price the revived have paid for being snatched back from the void. And again, we enter another gray area—just because a person can do something, does that mean they should? I loved the ethical conundrum of Ebron’s gift in this book. Is a man obligated to tamper with the natural order of life and death, just because he possesses the ability to do so? Where is the line between ability and responsibility? There were so many times I felt sorry for Ebron while reading Boneyard, and was angered, at times, by everyone who felt comfortable taking advantage of him.
The crux of the problems Ebron encounters in this installment of the Thaumaturge series rests in the fact that too many people now know what Ebron can do, and he’s attracted the attention of the wrong people. There’s a stranger in Heckerson, and he’s put Ebron on notice. Not to mention the local priest believes Ebron is in need of a good exorcism. My one and only complaint about this book is that once again it was plagued by an unfortunate plenitude of typos/grammar inconsistencies. That didn’t make me love the story any less, but it did make the reading—keeping my head in the game—a bit of challenge. What I loved outstrips the editing by a mile, though, and this ending, while not a cliffhanger in the strictest definition of the word, still left me hanging and anxious for book three.
You can buy Boneyard here:
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