My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Strong Language
Words have power. Intentions matter.
Most people come to Destiny Park for entertainment. They come to have their cards read to tell them a bit about their future. They come to walk through a beautiful park and to eat at the hotel’s restaurant. They come in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Arcana, the paranormal beings who rule the Isle of Wyrd.
But some people come to make a bargain with the Arcana—to change their fate. And some people come for dark purposes.
When Detective Beth Fahey is sent to Destiny Park to inquire about a “ghost gun,” she will begin a strange journey on which she must learn to navigate the Arcana’s unforgiving laws and dangerous attractions. Her search will draw her into seemingly impossible cases and the secrets of her own past as tensions rise between the Arcana and their human neighbors across the river.
For the Isle of Wyrd is a place where the dead ride trains to their final destinations, predators literally become prey, and seekers’ true natures are revealed in the ripples of destiny unknowingly stirred in their wakes.
Who will live? Who will die? And who will be lost in between?
I went into this with high hopes. I loved The Others series by this author and I wanted to see what she would come up with next. I ended up liking this but not loving it. I felt it was missing a little something. The characters felt a bit surface level to me and I think that was partly due to there being so many points of view. I think if the story had focused more on Beth—who seems to be the intended main character in the series, but it's hard to tell with her limited page time—then we could have gotten more development of her character. I'm not opposed to being in the other character's heads, I just think there were too many. Apparently—according to one review I read—the author was going for the feel of a TV show when she wrote this and it shows in how episodic it feels. Sometimes that works for me, but I didn't like it here.
This was a lot like The Others, and I feel like that should appeal to me more than it did. Maybe the problem is that it was too much like The Others. This very well could have been set somewhere else in that world instead of being a new one. I did like that Beth was more mature and less naive than Meg was in The Others, but I didn't think there were enough differences in the two series. We have humans acting very much the same way here that they did in that series, tempting fate with the supernatural creatures that inhabit the world, and suffering the consequences. The supernatural creatures are portrayed very much the same as they were in the other series as well. The characters and storylines from both worlds felt very interchangeable.
So, despite the fact that I liked this, I have mixed feelings on whether or not I want to continue with this series.
