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The question is not "What is wrong?"

A closer query would be "What is different?" or "What is changing?"

Something is changing. Something is shifting, or slipping. I want to ask if I'm losing my mind, but who would answer? How on earth can I step outside my brain and ask it to evaluate, with all fairness, its effectiveness as a body-governing device?

It might only lie to me. How would I know?

What if.........

What if Lizzie Borden really did take an axe and kill her father and stepmother?

And what if she had a really good reason?

Is something insidious stalking the town of Fall River, Massachusetts?


The reviews for this book are all over the place. Even among my friends opinions vary greatly. I ended up rather enjoying the story, it wasn't perfect but I was entertained nonetheless. I had readBoneshaker several years ago and enjoyed the story but not quite enough to continue with her other books in "The Clockwork Century" series, I'm just not a big steampunk fan.

This book seemed to fit very nicely into my interest in Lovecraft, legends and "what if" tales. The difficulty with writing this type of psychological horror is maintaining a sense of dread or impending doom. This book had some of these moments

This was something else....a dull roar-a rumbling, rolling, washing sound that came with an added whisper. Not quite the ocean. Not quite a seashell, held up to my ear. not that sound exactly, but something like it.

"That sound...that sound, it came from his mouth. It was the song of something dying. Something that never did live."

but had a hard time sustaining the feeling, at least for me. Multiple POVs including Lizzie, her sister Emma, the local town doctor, a professor from Miskatonic University give a wide look at the story from different angles. There is also a mysterious character sent from Boston to help with the investigation whose identity is never fully explained but I assume that and other dangling threads will be answered in future books. All in all I enjoyed the story and will certainly give any future books a once over.

3.5 rounded to 4

Can it be that ugly and easy?

We crawled primordial from the water, our grand-ancestors times a million generations; we escaped the tides, the sharks, and the leviathans of the deep, only to find ourselves on land-where we became the things we'd sought to escape, and we invented gods to blame. Not gods of the ocean, for we'd been to the ocean, and seen that the water was empty of the divine. Not gods of the earth, for we have walked upon the dirt, and we are alone here.

So we install our gods in the sky, because we haven't yet eliminated the firmament as a possibility.