Title: Seeker of Truth
Series: SPECTR Series Three: Book Three
Author: Jordan L. Hawk
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: Novella/Short Novel
Category: Urban Fantasy
At a Glance: Adding a fresh spin on a series that now spans—if my count is correct—fourteen books is an impressive feat of storytelling, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from this author. Jordan L. Hawk metes out the action in his customary style—with a sense of dread, a heaping helping of suspense, and a side of heartache to go with it.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Federal agent John Starkweather’s parents are dead. Or at least—the people he remembered as his parents. With his very identity in question, John must look elsewhere for answers.
The now-defunct Center for Loving Redemption may provide the clues he needs. But as John’s true memories begin to resurface, the answers prove worse than he ever imagined.
Review: Imagine waking up one day and discovering your existence is a made up of a long series of lies; that your name doesn’t identify who you are, or the people you come from and should belong to, but merely serves as a means of differentiating the concept of you from others. John Starkweather has spent years living someone else’s life, recalling someone else’s memories, existing in a life suddenly void of a solid foundation. He is a living, breathing facsimile, a replica of the someone born as the actual John Starkweather. And he is now the seeker of truth, the truth of who he was, is, how he came into being, and who orchestrated this cruel and unusual deception.
The people John had always known as his parents have died a suspicious death and though there was no love lost between them, the SPECTR agent in him still demands he dig into the anomalies in the case, and what he’s always known to be his reality, which leads him, along with Ryan—the man John knows as a cousin—and a recent addition to the team, a drakul named Night, to the place where all of John’s troubles began. There is a long history of evil committed in the name of piety, and while John is aware of that, he also discovers that the place where his memories are sharp with the pain of betrayal isn’t what it had once presented itself to be. There are horrors and secrets hidden within the walls of the now defunct Center for Loving Redemption, and Jordan L. Hawk reveals them in his customary style—with a sense of dread, a heaping helping of suspense, and a side of heartache to go with it.
While John, Night, and Ryan hit the road on their investigation, Caleb and Gray stay behind with Zahira in New Orleans to look into the deaths of two men in a family that appears to be on the hitlist of a particularly slippery NHE. Their investigation sheds light on the skeletons in that family’s closet, as compassion wars with lawfulness in the resolution of the murders. Hawk delivers those black, white, and gray areas as adeptly as he continues to draw readers into the always unpredictable developments that have taken place across the expanse of this series. The bonds of affection between Caleb and Gray, of course, remain a highlight as is the love between them and John.
Night continues to be an interesting addition to the mix, juxtaposing the differences between Gray and others of his kind, but also giving insight into Night’s growing curiosity of Gray’s investment in mortal nonsense along with the emotional attachment to the humans Gray has bonded with. Night can’t seem to help being intrigued despite his inability to decipher what makes this particular group of humans so special. As he acts instinctively at a crucial point in the action, he becomes the de facto hero of the story, even if he would never process the situation in that way; he merely did what comes naturally. That he’s elected to stay, out of curiosity rather than the need to be connected to others, creates an interesting potential for the dilemma of how the dead body he inhabits, not to mention his obvious ‘otherness’, will affect and influence things going forward.
The focus on John’s storyline is doing nothing if not giving him a fuller, richer role in what had been, in the beginning, focused on Caleb and Gray’s adaptation. Adding a fresh spin on a series that now spans—if my count is correct—fourteen books is an impressive feat of storytelling, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from this author. His prodigious imagination combined with the acquaintance of an impressive variety of ghouls and legends has reinforced a steady dose of action and suspense. The discovery of John’s identity, where he came from, and how he got where he is, is now just the cherry on the supernatural sundae.
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