{"id":1183,"date":"2013-10-31T21:24:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T03:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1183"},"modified":"2013-10-31T21:24:22","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T03:24:22","slug":"julia-spencer-fleming-through-the-evil-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/julia-spencer-fleming-through-the-evil-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Spencer-Fleming: Through the Evil Days"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I think what makes some series writers special \u2013 or one of the things, at least \u2013 is the ability to treat each installment differently.\u00a0 The characters belong to the arc, but each story is told in a specific and different way that almost makes each novel a standalone.\u00a0 Julia Spencer-Fleming has this skill, and she proves herself to be spectacularly versatile in her seventh novel, delivering a pure thriller.<\/p>\n

\"evil-days\"<\/a>In each novel her setting of Miller\u2019s Kill, New York, is a character in some sense.\u00a0 In this novel it\u2019s an aggressive character in the form of a horrible ice storm that never seems to end.\u00a0 It makes you shiver and hope February, when it arrives, isn\u2019t this terrible.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a story along with the weather, of course.\u00a0 We join Episcopal Priest Clare and Police Chief Russ in the first couple months of their marriage, Clare newly pregnant, and Russ not so sure how he feels about it.\u00a0 He\u2019s in his early 50s as opposed to Clare\u2019s middle 30s and had visualized grandchildren rather than children of his own at this stage in his life.<\/p>\n

This, of course, is a great way for Spencer-Fleming to maintain the tension that made her first several novels so memorable, where Clare was a single priest and Russ a married police chief.\u00a0 Any devotee of this series knows what\u2019s happened since In the Bleak Midwinter<\/i>, and Spencer-Fleming has neatly avoided the common trap of losing all tension and interest after the main characters marry.\u00a0 \u201cThe course of true love never did run smooth\u201d might be an apt description of their relationship.<\/p>\n

Along with Clare and Russ\u2019 story is the story of a missing little girl, an 8-year-old who is not only missing but who has had a recent kidney transplant and will die without her medication.\u00a0 That gives the story a built-in drive as the tiny Miller\u2019s Kill police force bands together to try and find her.\u00a0 Clare and Russ are on their honeymoon and because of the weather, unreachable, further complicating matters.<\/p>\n

The little girl was being fostered by a couple whose house has burned down, and her mother, a meth addict, can\u2019t be found.\u00a0 The ties to the meth culture are deep and frightening, and it\u2019s a further complication as the cops \u2013 mainly Hadley Knox and Kevin Flynn, furiously avoiding an obvious attraction to each other \u2013 try desperately to find her.<\/p>\n

Spencer-Fleming keeps her thriller fresh with the depth of her characterizations, from Hadley and Kevin to one of the meth heads to everyone else in between.\u00a0 The ties that break your heart and the ties that bind the characters together make this novel sparkle.\u00a0 The ending has both good and bad resolutions, as well as some obvious threads for the next novel to pick up on.\u00a0 That can\u2019t come soon enough for me, though I hope the next one happens in the springtime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think what makes some series writers special \u2013 or one of the things, at least \u2013 is the ability to treat each installment differently.\u00a0 The characters belong to the arc, but each story is told in a specific and different way that almost makes each novel a standalone.\u00a0 Julia Spencer-Fleming has this skill, and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-1183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}