The Extraordinary Locket of Elijah Gray Carnival of Mysteries Book #8
Kiss Drunk Books
Sept 6, 2023
Kindle
374
Amazon
Don’t look. It isn’t there.
On the day Eli almost drowned in Coup d’Oeil Lake, a boy pulled him to shore and took him to a carnival. Nobody saw the boy or the carnival—not the lights, not the crowds, not the rides. So Eli kept quiet and ignored what he’d seen. He’s good at ignoring things now…
Except for the shadows.
Those he can’t ignore.
One step from homelessness and flirting with assault and battery every time somebody pisses him off makes the caretaker gig on out-of-the-way Greenwood Glen a safe place for Wade to cool his jets for a while. All he has to do is take care of a ramshackle house nobody lives in. Easy peasy.
At first.
The house was quiet until the prickly Elijah Gray returned home with his fluffy cat and woke something up.
Something dark and mysterious… and deadly.
Review by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
This is a ghost story and a love story—two love stories, actually. The ghostly part of the story is elusive, and intentionally so. Kayleigh Sky introduces us to Elijah Gray as a slightly lost, somewhat tremulous young man. His life appears to be something that happens to him. Soon enough, we understand why.He also seems to have a ghost that haunts him…but in an oddly passive, benign way.
This all changes when Eli decides, against his uncle’s advice, to return to the isolated house on a large private island called Greenwood Glen in an even larger lake. The property is connected to the mainland by a mile-long causeway, which is the site of Eli’s greatest trauma.
Eli decides to return to Greenwood Glen, his only asset, soon after he hires Wade Jenkins to replace the property’s longtime caretaker. Wade is another young man who is only half-living his life. He is the opposite of Eli Gray in every way—big, muscled, tattooed, filled with anger (because he, too, has been shaped by trauma). He sees the long-unoccupied house and the abandoned estate as both a cushy job and a potential hiding place for treasure. Rumors of ghosts and hidden money are the only things about the place that interest him.
Until he meets Eli Gray.
The Carnival of Mysteries plays a familiar, and yet eerily different role in this book. It appears twice in the story; once in the distant past, and once for Eli and Wade to visit. The Carnival also appears, confusedly, in Eli’s memories, linked to the dark night when he lost his mother.
The author weaves a subtle web, the story’s eeriness building as the reader gets to know Greenwood Glen through both Eli’s and Wade’s eyes. The narrative is carefully confusing, not muchclarified by flashbacks into the life of a young man known as Jay, whose father built the house and the boys’ school that used to stand on the island. It’s marvelously creepy. The idyllic green island becomes increasingly oppressive, as Eli and Wade begin to guess at its secrets.
A detail I particularly liked was that Eli feels clearly that, whatever is going on inside it, the house itself is not to blame. It is not a malign place. Something bad happened here, but the house is just a house. Eli finds that he loves the house, and is determined to figure out what happened.
Wade, on the other hand, begins to find that he cares about Eli, whose predicament gives him, for the first time in his young life, something positive on which to focus his energy. For all his bravado, Wade doesn’t think much of himself. Eli makes him feel better, which is more of a super-power than either of them understand.
The locket of the title doesn’t seem to be as extraordinary as one would expect. Like so many of the book’s complications, it’s a subtle detail the importance of which must be figured out slowly. Taking time over this book is worth it, as all of its little pieces come together in a powerful finale that I found very moving.
