Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty) braids together the sensuous underworld of 1920s speakeasies, the glamour of the Ziegfeld Follies and a sense of evil greater than Prohibition-era police corruption in her edge-of-the-seat new series.
Seventeen-year-old Evie O'Neill is as complex as Bray's previous series heroine, Gemma Doyle. Her sense of entitlement masks deep sorrow and an intelligence that often goes unappreciated in a male-dominated society. Gemma's tragedy was the death of her mother; Evie's is the death of her brother, James, in the Great War. When Evie gets tipsy at a soiree and performs a party trick that involves holding and "reading" Harold Brodie's class ring, she divulges his shameful secret. Evie's parents send her from Zenith, Ohio, to New York City to board with her Uncle Will until things cool down. Evie's thrilled to head for Manhattan, where her uncle runs the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. When a string of murders seems to have supernatural ties, New York detectives draw on Will's expertise, and Evie's own "gift" comes into play.
Bray's writing is at her spine-tingling best here (e.g., "Blackened gravestones tilted like crooked teeth in a rotting mouth"). The book is thick, but the pages fly, and Bray leaves hints of a "coming storm" to lure readers back for the next installment. With romance, mystery, glamour and history as bait, Libba Bray is sure to hook new readers as well as welcome back her legion Gemma Doyle series fans. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness