Friday, October 16, 2009

Deadly Harvest by Heather Graham


Wow! I love a good ghost story and Heather Graham delivers a great one in Deadly Harvest, the second installment in her Flynn brothers trilogy. Aidan, Jeremy and Zach Flynn inherited a mansion outside of New Orleans from a great-aunt whom they have never heard of before her death. Aidan, the oldest of the brothers, and his now-wife Kendall deal with their own ghosts that haunt the mansion in Deadly Night.

Deadly Harvest opens in New Orleans just before Halloween as Jeremy Flynn is involved in a series of debates with Rowenna Cavanaugh on the use of paranormal abilities in detective work. Rowenna is open to the possibilities but Jeremy is adamantly closed-minded. Still the debates are a great money-raiser for Aidan and Kendall Children’s House charities.

Jeremy and Rowenna, for different reasons and different ways, are caught up in the same mystery back in Rowenna’s hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. The wife of Jeremy’s ex-partner vanishes in thin air from a cemetery on Halloween in the middle of town when Salem is packed with tourists.

The detective on the case is the father of the man Rowenna was to marry until her fiancé was killed in Iraq. She remains as close to him as if actually was her father-in-law by marriage. Joe does not like private investigators like Jeremy Flynn, but through her, they forge an uneasy alliance.

Although she denies having a ‘gift’ or any psychic abilities, Rowenna ‘sees’ things and can sometimes put herself into a victim’s place to solve crimes. This ability leads her to the body of a young woman who has been strangled and hung up like a scarecrow. Since it isn’t Jeremy’s friend, the chilling realization that a serial killer is loose soaks into the close-knit community.

Jeremy stays close-minded but is haunted by the ghost of a young boy Billy who drowned several years before. Jeremy was a forensic diver back then and was unable to save Billy. He continues to torture himself for not being there two minutes earlier that he might have saved him. But as with Deadly Night, Deadly Harvest has a benevolent ghost and in this case, it’s young Billy. The reader gets the notion that Billy is not vengeful long before Jeremy does.

Unlike the first book though, Deadly Harvest contains many disturbing references to demonism, since the murderer in the story is trying to become the Prince of Darkness in the flesh and must sacrifice young women to achieve his goal.

Though not as many ghosts as the first, Deadly Harvest moves at an exciting, pulse-pounding pace and is very difficult to put down. I read the nearly four-hundred page book in one day. It’s that good.

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