Catharsis by Indie Author Jonathan Face

Indie Author Jonathan Face delivers a suspenseful, mysteriously, unfolding tale of a condemned town. As the story slowly progresses, the reader is left with a feeling of dread, a feeling that something bad is going to happen in Spring City. The inhabitants of this small town seem like good enough people, but they all have secrets. Unfortunately, you can't hide your secrets from unknown forces hell bent on bringing justice upon town's occupants.

Throughout the story, you learn a little bit about each character until you have a picture in your head that leaves you knowing that this isn't a good person, despite the warm and fuzzy facade.  Jonathan Face does a good job building the characters into real people, giving away only a little about their pasts.

As a snow storm moves through the town, the inhabitants bear down for a bad storm. Slowly, things draw the residents out (or for some, into their homes) to their deaths. The innocent are pulled away to be saved.

Jonathan Face's writing style is enjoyable to read, and the book was pretty well edited and proofed. The only annoyance that I found was the use of the word 'presently'. Of course, this is only my opinion, if you say that someone did something, I assume that, in the story, they are doing it then. I don't need to know that 'Presently, he walked down the street' or whatever action was taken. In this instance, the story was in the past tense, so no one actually did anything presently. There, my rant is done.

There were a few, I won't call them plot holes, but a few places where I wanted to know more information about the characters. For instance, we get to know the town librarian Kathy. She has a tainted past and moves to Spring City to hide and probably escape consequences. I have no idea what she did, but I want to know. At one point in the story, near the end, she is almost forced to tell her story to another deranged citizen, but their chat is interrupted and Kathy's story is never told. I'm still left wondering what she did.

Overall, an excellent, suspenseful, compelling story. I'll be on the lookout for more novels by Jonathan Face.

Right now, Catharsis is free for Nook and Kindle.

Law of Nines

I was quite skeptical of this book as soon as I started reading it and realized that there were people traveling through different, parallel worlds.  The premise for this book is that everything surrounding this man, Alex's, life is affected by the number 9, a multiple of nine, or a factor of nine and that he is solely responsible for saving the entire civilization of a parallel world that is completely unknown to him.  This world is somehow tied to land that he is set to inherit when he turns 27 (9 times 3, 3 being a factor of 9).

I found myself reading far longer than I thought I had been each night trying to figure out what was going on throughout the book.  The plot sounds pretty straight forward, however, the author adds elements at times that don't seem to fit, but in the end, all the pieces fall into place.

The author was able to incorporate magical elements through the use of the parallel world.  This world used magic for the things that we use technology for.  It was really amazing to hear the character, Jax, describe the technology that she saw in our world as seemingly impossible and that she viewed it as we would view magic.  After reflecting on this, I realized that the things that we take for granted in our lives that we don't understand how they work, are like magic.

A part of the book that I found frustrating was that people could travel from this parallel world into our world, however, when Alex wanted to travel to Jax's world, he was unable.  Jax was even unable to bring things from our world into her world.  How did she manage to travel between worlds without suffering a fate worse than death?

Terry Goodkind is definitely on my list of authors to read in the future.