Boundary Haunted by Melissa F. OlsonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Excellent Book and Superb Performance
This review is based on listening to the audio book available through Audible. The narrator is Kate Rudd.
I have become a great admirer of Kate Rudd’s narration and this series has been part of that. She is an incredibly skilled actor who clearly differentiates between characters at the flip of a switch, which is not an easy task. It’s easy to forget that it is only one person reading the book sometimes. I found it difficult to stop listening to this audio book because her performance was so engaging.
The book itself was superbly constructed. This author never fails to deliver an excellent piece of fiction. Her world building is always fascinating and her characters are wonderfully engaging. I really love Allison ‘Lex’ Luther, a former Sargent in the Army. She is also a Boundary Witch, a witch who’s magic relates to the boundary between the living and the dead. It’s a very specialised type of magic and the witches who perform it were hunted down and killed over the centuries because of the nature of their magic being distasteful and because they have the ability to control vampires in the same way vampires control humans. This magic also means that Lex is someone who can see ghosts and help them move on to where they were originally supposed to go when they died. This is why she is called in to help the Cardinal Vampire of Atlanta, Beau. Beau is well known for eccentricities and he requests help to find his ‘missing’ ghosts. This have disappeared from all over Atlanta and Beau doesn’t want them to be gone as he is able to see them, unlike most vampires.
Lex is reticent to travel to a city packed full of ghosts after her recent run in with a tunnel filled with aggressive wraiths. However, her sister tells her to go to help her get over her fear. When Lex arrives she finds a much more complex situation than some missing ghosts, and she digs her heels in to find out who is stealing the ghosts and why..
There were several points during this book that I was sure I knew what was going on, only to change my mind a chapter later. This author is very good at dropping breadcrumbs that lead to a dead end, only to reveal a trap door hidden under the rug. The reader is kept on their toes all the way through as the plot is a complicated dance through vampire and witch culture in Atlanta. Lex is on her own as an investigator because her normal partner in these sorts of matters, Quinn, was unable to go with her. It meant that Lex’s character had a chance to grow and challenge her own capabilities.
One of the things I love about these books is that Lex is not an all powerful magical being. She has very real limitations and her magic is incredibly specific. In a narrow set of circumstances she is extremely powerful, but nudge one of those circumstances out of alignment and she’s forced to rely on her training as a soldier and her friends and allies. Lex nearly always works with a team and I love that, because her limitations force the author to plot creatively. It also adds extra dimension to her relationships with other characters.
I really hope that this author continues to write about Lex, because I think it will be a very long time before I get bored of this character and the wonderful world in which she lives.
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