In Possession, it is some time later and Harper’s rib is no longer cracked. She is approached by a woman whose sister may or may not be possessed by a ghost, which leads her to several people dealing with the fear of insurance agencies and their own comatose family members who are also exhibiting strange behaviours which turn out to ultimately be the doing of a god that I’ve never heard of1 and Quinton’s dad. Kind of.
This book was odd in that I was expecting something more along book 4. In Vanished, everything drove the story toward the climax of the first arc and this one felt like it was more setup for that inevitable climax-building novel. I think this was mostly due to Quinton being completely removed from most of the narrative because he was off playing spy or having spats with Harper while she was still debating whether or not she was being a good friend/lover/etc.2
I also kind of want to smack Quinton. This friendship thing has gone on long enough. It might be because I’m still remembering the soul link in the back of my head while I’m reading all this and he’s picking up on nothing, or it’s the fact that he seems to be off dealing with the main plot and having adventures I’d like to see while Harper is dealing with what feels like a B plot, but the fact that he has taken himself out of the majority of the novel annoyed the hell out of me.
And let’s talk a little about that main plot. In the main plot that we don’t get to see, Purlis stalks Harper and they have one altercation before we stop seeing him for a while. He has apparently brought a goddess of hunger out of Europe and to Seattle, as well as opened up a facility where he experiments on the paranormal. We are told that these experiments are awful, but see precisely none of them.3 We never see what his ultimate goal is either, but Quinton instead tells us that he’s out to make the US the most powerful country in the world and make the rest of the world bow to it. He’s a super villain.
He’s also constantly referred to as “Papa Purlis” which would have annoyed me if Harper didn’t also call him “Daddy Purlis” at some point. Harper, you are in your thirties. You don’t like the guy, just call him by his last name. It’s really just that easy. Just because you’re kind of magically married to Quinton doesn’t mean you have to refer to him as your father in law every time you mention him.
I did enjoy the Harper plot line, though, once it picked up at the 50% mark of the book. The pieces fell into place and, if I didn’t know this was the second to last book in the series, it would have been a lot of fun seeing her dealing with the ghosts who haunted her personally.4 The mechanics of the hauntings and going through old Seattle and Pike Market’s history were great elements and I liked the idea of the big bad of Harper’s plot being Lizzy Hazzard riding the tail of a famine god.
Really, most of my issues with the book stem directly from the fact that I know it’s the second to last book and it’s not directly building up to that climax. I realize this time, the central point of the conflict is probably going to be Quinton rather than Harper so it makes sense that he’s the one having plot-related adventures, but that just made his absence in the book that much more evident.
I think I might need a Quinton side story of just this book. He did end up strapped to a chair by his father and he was about to be fed to a god before his girlfriend showed up. We never really did find out what any of that was about, only that it ended with Purlis getting shot in the leg and Quinton being very nice to him in getting him to a hospital for the not at all life threatening injury. I don’t really get what happened there, because the dialogue all felt forced and the scene felt like things needed to happen so they happened as opposed to the characters acting of their own accord.
I also need a Cam book. Now that I have solid confirmation that Edward is dead and Cam is now the reigning king of the vampires in Seattle, I want to know how that happened and how he came to own this strange house by the sea that he’s living in. Really, I just want to know a lot about what happens with the vampires at this point because I feel like a lot of stuff was skipped.
There was also the weird religious bit at the end. Apparently there was an angel that healed them all at the end of the story. Or maybe it was a ghost, except that ghosts don’t do that as near as I can tell. It was such a strange moment of needing everything to end happily that I’m not really sure what the point of it was. Harper isn’t carrying injuries into the next books anymore, so that wasn’t why it happened. The other characters effected were side characters. Is it to bring a religious aspect into the book near the end? Will it somehow be plot relevant? Will it be thematically relevant?
I’m thinking it was probably for the happy ending and a clean wrap up before the end of book hook into the final installment. Here’s hoping it all wraps up nicely at the end of Revenant!
[AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”0451465458″]- And therefore Harper could not Google [↩]
- The subplot just won’t die. [↩]
- Even when they go into the facility. ow hard would it have been to just have them walk past a window and see a screaming vampire with a sun spot pointed somewhere on him and his intestines on the table next to him? The room could be sound proof. It would have added some nice atmosphere. [↩]
- Although still no idea what was with the black ghosts vs any of the other ones. [↩]