Kembral Thorne is spending a few hours away from her newborn, and she's determined to enjoy herself at this party no matter what. But when the guests start dropping dead, Kem has no choice but to get to work. She is a Hound, after all, and she can't help picking up the scent of trouble.
She’s not the only one. Her professional and personal nemesis, notorious burglar Rika Nonesuch, is on the prowl. They quickly identify what’s causing the a mysterious grandfather clock that sends them down an Echo every time it chimes. In each strange new layer of reality, time resets and a sinister figure appears to perform a blood-soaked ritual.
As Kem and Rika fall into increasingly macabre versions of their city, they’ll need to rely on their wits—and each other—to unravel the secret of the clock and save their home.
It’s been a long time, at least eight or nine years, since I’ve read a book based on another blogger’s review. When I stopped blogging, I also stopped reading blogs. Honestly, that hurt more than anything else, but I needed to completely step away; otherwise, I would have felt even worse for abandoning something I’d poured so many years into. I didn’t need the reminder of what I was walking away from, even though it was the right decision at the time.
That brings us to today and my absolute love of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. I had read Roberta’s review of The Last Soul Among Wolves on her blog, Offbeat YA, and I knew it was something I needed to read for myself. Since it was the second book in a series, I immediately opened my Libby app to see if I could get the first book from my library system, and I was thrilled when I found it! Luckily, there were no holds, and I started reading within twenty minutes of finishing Roberta’s review.
Truthfully, I was a little lost at first. For some reason, it took me longer than usual to catch onto the Echo system of alternate realities. I’m going to blame my recent inability to get decent sleep. Once my tired brain caught on, though, I was hooked.
Kembral is one of those characters I want to hang out with. She’s a new mother trying to balance her instinct to be there for her child with her desire to return to a profession she loves and excels at. She’s a Hound, one of the best. She has an innate ability to travel between alternate dimensions, called Echos, and retrieve people (or in one case, a dog) who have fallen into them. Think of an old illustration of the Earth cut in half, showing the layers inside: crust, mantle, outer core, inner core. That’s the picture I had in my head, except there are eleven Echos. As you go deeper, they become more and more warped. Trees can have hands, buildings may have mouths, and people you know in the Prime reality might no longer look human the further down you go. In other words, Kembral is a badass. I want to be her when I grow up.
To say I enjoyed this doesn’t do justice to how lost I became in the story. It wasn’t perfect; there were a few moments that pulled me out for just a second or two, but those pale in comparison to how quickly the author was able to pull me right back in. It has everything I need to keep my interest: larger-than-life characters who somehow still feel grounded in their reality, complex mythology and world-building, and stakes that couldn’t be higher. It also helps that there were a few murders thrown in for good measure.
This isn’t a reality I’d ever want to live in, but I’m more than happy to keep visiting and hanging out with Kembral and Rika (who I didn’t even mention until now, but her snark is amazing) for as long as the author keeps writing new adventures for them.
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