Review: A Gripping Quest for Truth
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2013
SOUTHERN CROSS by Jen Blood is popular lit at its best. It took me a day to devour it, the third book in the Erin Solomon Series, and I have to tell you that there is nothing like the allure of the story of Erin and Stein and Diggs and Jack, nothing with its particular brand of humor, its touching love story, its sense of place, nothing with its sometimes lovable, often grizzly cast of minor characters, nothing that compares with the action and exhilaration that Jen Blood packs into this character-centered story.It's six months after the events in SINS OF THE FATHER, and investigative journalist Erin Solomon meets her lifelong friend Diggs in Kentucky--he's there to mourn the death of a friend.In this third book, Jen Blood returns to an eschatological theme, this time involving an end of days cult and its rabid preacher bent on the punishment of sinners. As Erin grapples to understand the central truth surrounding her father, the sense of doom in this book is almost overwhelming, even as Erin and Diggs struggle to move their relationship to a new level. Toward the end of the book, they are convinced of a more powerful being behind the villains in SOUTHERN CROSS, someone or something elusive and hidden and unnamed, an entity controlling the strings, an embodiment of evil that is unstoppable and cries out for more--more strength, more questing, more pain.And while the ending swept me away in its bone-chilling action and I felt a definite closure, SOUTHERN CROSS also compels me to want read the next book in the series.So if you like mystery with sometimes dark and graphic detail, an intricate plot, a love story that is elegiac in its beauty even as the story's action is unrelenting; if you long for smooth, clean writing with a unique sense of humor, then SOUTHERN CROSS is for you.