Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Dangerous Spirits
SERIES: Spirits #2
AUTHOR: Jordan L. Hawk
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 157 pages
BLURB:
After the events of Reyhome Castle, Henry Strauss expected the Psychical Society to embrace his application of science to the study of hauntings. Instead, the society humiliates and blacklists him. His confidence shaken, he can’t bring himself to admit the truth to his lover, the handsome medium Vincent Night.
Vincent’s new life in Baltimore with Henry is disrupted when a friend from the past asks for help with a haunting. In the remote town of Devil’s Walk, old ties and new lies threaten to tear the lovers apart, if a fiery spirit bent on vengeance doesn’t put an end to them first.
REVIEW:
Sure that his invention’s success at Reyhome Castle will impress, Henry Strauss goes into the meeting at the Psychical Society with eagerness. But when the presentation is over, it is not applause that meets him but a resounding No, and a door slammed in his face. With Vincent, Lizzy, and Jo depending on him to bring in customers and money, Henry doesn’t know what to do when it seems like neither of those things will be coming their way.
So he lies.
Before he can come clean and hopefully salvage some of his relationships, a customer comes asking for Vincent and Lizzy–on the advise of an old friend of theirs. Seems a mining company is having a bit of a ghost problem. Desperate to prove himself and his machines–and to have a least a bit more time with the man he loves–Henry decides to tag along. But the ghost proves to much more powerful than they imagined. With each failure Henry gets more desperate. Unfortunately if things keep going they they have been, he might not even have a life to save, let alone a love.
Oh boy, but did I want to shake some sense into Henry during this book. I very much wanted to employ the tried and true method of locking Henry in a closet with Vincent until he either came clean or they both ripped each others clothes off in frustration. Preferably both. But no matter how man times I found myself utterly frustrated with his lack of honesty I totally loved the tension it brought to the story.
There is just something about the problem of loathing something so completely (like Henry does with the lies that populate the psychic medium field) and still finding yourself trapped by that same problem yourself. It is something we all have to face. And while to some it may seem a bit hypocritical, I think Henry is just human enough to have flaws. He lies not to harm those he loves–even though it ends up being an unintended consequence–but he lets himself forget that his work is not what draws his lover, friend, and family to him. It is his character.
I love how complex and yet relatively simple Jordan L. Hawk’s characters are. They seem almost too easy to fall in love with. You care about them long after they story ends, and find yourself so caught up in their stories that it almost a let-down to remember that they are not real.
Even the ghosts and the bad guys are never shallow shadows that haunt the edges of the story. They have a depth that allows you to understand them even as you hate them. It doesn’t hurt that this complexity helps make one damn good mystery.
While it would be hard to top my love of Whyborne and Griffin, Henry and Vincent are a very close second. Both seem be the fated other half of the other. I loved this book probably as much as the first and feel that it is another great addition to Jordan Hawk’s work, and to the growing collection of historical paranormal mysteries in this genre.
RATING: 
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