2023-01-12
This volume containing two novellas from the world of These Violent Delights presents new mysteries featuring familiar faces.
In A Foul Thing, Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai’s life of wedded bliss in Zhouzhuang township is disrupted by a ghost from their past. It’s 1931, 4 years since they faked their own deaths in the explosion that rocked Shanghai, when a young man approaches them with a request to protect his fiancee. After Roma and Juliette save the woman from an assailant, she reveals that she once participated in an experiment conducted by a group of Russian scientists and Lourens Van Dijk, the man whose serum made Rosalind, Juliette’s cousin, immortal. Alarmed by Van Dijk’s involvement, the couple decide to probe deeper, and the answers they find compel them to ask old friends for help. Things pick up a few months later in This Foul Murder, when lovers Benedikt Montagov and Marshall Seo board the Trans-Siberian Express to find Van Dijk and bring him to Zhouzhuang. A gruesome murder at the start of the journey threatens to disrupt the train schedule, so Benedikt and Marshall take matters into their own hands and begin investigating to find the killer. The stories, while action-packed and full of danger, are less harrowing than the characters’ previous adventures. Flirty banter and tender moments between both couples are liberally sprinkled throughout, making for entertaining interludes that set the stage for the next book.
Will delight shippers and whet fans’ appetites. (Historical fantasy. 13-18)
