Brought to you by OBS reviewer Daniele

Beware of slight spoilers

Synopsis:

Maud Strand has an idyllic life with her parents in New Orleans, surrounded by family and friends. From childhood, she has had prophetic dreams which benefit Adele, the family housekeeper, who does a little gambling. Maud attends Catholic schools and explores the occult as a teenager.

Maud is in college when she’s traumatized by the sudden death of her father in a car accident. She and her mother both wallow in grief for a year, but Maud begins to feel alienated from her mother, Celia, especially when she starts dating a tourist from Montana. When Celia begins talking about remarriage, Maud moves to New York.

Maud has a secret, something she can’t remember, and this secret is running her life. And, she’s angry because on the day her father died, she believes someone stole his trumpet from the front seat of his car.

In New York, Maud meets Lina Sandor who makes her living as a psychic under the name Madame Budska. But Madame Budska is no ordinary psychic because her New York clients are a billionaire hedge fund manager, a political kingmaker, a studio head, a TV talk show host, and a crazy college professor.

After a few months, Lina asks Maud to take over the psychic business while Lina goes away for a couple of weeks for what she calls “the big reveal.” Very reluctant at first, Maud finally agrees and begins training for the job. Madame Budska teaches Maud to “listen until you hear” and “look until you see.” And as Maud does that, she has powerful dreams that give her deep insight into the behavior of the influential people she is meeting.

What Maud wants is to be able to dream about the dead so that she can talk to her dad. It’s this desire that leads Maud through a dark tunnel from which she must learn to escape on her own. (Goodreads)

Review:

 I found Saints in the Shadows to be an unusual tale.  It centers around Maud, who is in her early twenties and struggling with grief, and her landlady Lina, who works as a psychic under the guise of Madame Budska.  After Maud’s father dies in an accident, her life comes to a halt because her father is gone and her idyllic life is over.  After a year, she decides to pick up where she left off and move to New York City to ultimately go to design school.  However, she is still haunted by the mystery of what happened to her father’s prized trumpet the night of the accident and plagued with prophetic dreams.  She eventually takes up residence in Lina’s building.  Slowly they build a kind of friendship and discuss what Lina’s psychic ability really entails.  Maud reluctantly agrees to fill in for Lina when she must leave town.  She finds the clients a bit repulsive and struggles to not get too involved with their lives.  Detective Rilke, whom she met while sleepwalking, looks after her while Lina is away and a bit of a romance develops.  Finally, Maud is able to decipher and understand her own abilities and remembers the events of the day her father dies and the location of the trumpet.

Maud, Lina, and Rilke were interesting characters, and I would have liked to know more about them. At 199 pages, I wish the book had been longer.  It seemed like there was more story to be told.  I found it interesting that Lina claimed her abilities were really all about observations, psychology, and physics (the transference of energy), although there was obviously more to it for both Lina and Maud.  I found the sessions with clients to be a bit boring.

I give Saints in the Shadows a solid three stars (which means I liked it) and recommend it to those interested in psychics and stories about moving on with life after tragedy.

*OBS would like to thank the author for supplying a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*