The Dazzling Darkness
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
BRONZE MEDAL WINNER, Readers' Favorite International Book Award, 2014.
GOTHIC READERS BOOK CLUB CHOICE AWARD WINNER, 2013.
A cemetery. A lost child. An ancient secret. Do you believe in ghosts? In Old Willow Cemetery, Elias Hatch protects the secret power buried inside his cemetery, and he knows five-year-old Henry Brooke has managed to get inside the locked gates. Who let him inside? Where is he now? Antonia Brooke and her husband Adam frantically search the woods and all of Concord to find their little boy. Not until Detective Mike Balducci discovers the crystal sculpture buried in Old Willow, not until he discovers the apparitions hiding within the woods, not until he discovers the dazzling faces inside the darkened air, does he find the clues to what happened to Henry Brooke in Concord, Massachusetts. This is a supernatural mystery about a family who confronts long-buried secrets of the dead. Do you believe in haunted cemeteries? Come into the dazzling darkness.
Midwest Book Review: "Paula Cappa is a master of the metaphysical mystery genre...an extraordinary and original storyteller of the first rank. Very highly recommended." 5-Stars
Satin Paperbacks: "A supernatural adventure ... steeped in fulsome imagination, twists and turns. Gripping and absorbing, this is worth your time."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Five-year-old Henry Brooke disappears mysteriously in Cappa's amateurish paranormal thriller, set in a present day that feels weirdly like the 19th century. Henry's parents mobilize the entire town of Concord, Mass., in a search for him, and suspicion settles on Elias Hatch, the reclusive keeper of a cemetery that's always locked. Predictably, Hatch has secrets of his own: the dead in his cemetery are actually quite lively. Worried relatives, dead Transcendentalists, legendary crystal skulls, unnecessary (and clich d) Vatican investigators, and dubious angelology tangle up in a plot overstuffed with detail. Cappa (Abasteron House) displays evidence of solid research on the Transcendentalists, but her prose is clunky, her characters flat, and her thrills unthrilling. The Concord setting could be almost anywhere. Despite the lack of writerly craft, the sheer quantity of incident does at least mean that the book is never boring. (BookLife)
