Lyn Benedict
Gods & Monsters
Shadows Inquiries, Book #3

Review brought to you by OBS staff member Heidi

Sylvie Lightner is back on the case in the third installment of the Shadows Inquiries series by Lyn Benedict.  This time Sylvie is looking for a missing woman and the case turns out to be more than she bargained for (as usual) when she discovers five dead women floating in a lake.  She calls the police in on the case and everyone is stunned when the police are attacked by the dead women.

Sylvie ends up bringing her favorite necromancer, Tierney Wales, in on the case to help get to the bottom of what’s going on.  Together they discover that a powerful and cursed sorcerer has the women under his spell as a way to fight the effects of his curse.  But he quickly burns through his victims and then must replace them.  Sylvie and Wells are on a race against the clock to find the God that cursed him and convince him to lift the curse so the sorcerer will release the women before it’s too late for Sylvie’s missing woman.

I was really hoping that this series was going to continue to build and get better, but unfortunately this installment fell flat for me and was an excruciatingly slow read even though it was barely over 300 pages.

I did like Wells in this book, but found his character in this installment to seem more and more like Wright from Ghosts & Echoes the longer I kept reading.  But it was nice to see a budding relationship forming for him and Alex!!

I also liked that at the end of this book Sylvie starts questioning herself and what it means to be the “New Lilith”.  It gives us a glimpse of what’s to come in future installments although I’m not convinced that I’ll be reading that far into the series as it struggles to hold my interest.

I really didn’t like this book.  I thought the idea of a sorcerer using innocent people to counter-act a curse to be interesting and creative, but everything seemed so drawn out that it was just boring to me.  I struggled with what to rate it and settled on a disappointing two stars out of five.