Review Blitz: Witch of the Cards

Blurb

Witch of the Cards is historical, supernatural romantic suspense set in 1932 on the Jersey shore. Twenty-two year-old Fiera has recently left the Brooklyn orphanage where she was raised, and works in Manhattan as a nanny. She gets a lucky break when her boss pays for her short vacation in Asbury Park. One evening, Fiera and her new friend Dulcie wander down the boardwalk and into Peter Dune’s Tarot & Séance, where they attend a card reading.

Fiera has always had an unsettling ability to know things before they happen and sense people’s hidden agendas. She longs to either find out the origin of her powers or else banish them because as is, they make her feel crazy. When, during the reading, her energies somehow bond with Peter Dune’s and form an undeniable ethereal force, a chain of revelations and dangerous events begin to unspool. For one, Fiera finds out she is a witch from a powerful sea clan, but that someone is out to stop her blossoming power forever. And though she is falling in love with Peter, he also has a secret side. He’s no card reader, but a private detective working to expose mediums. Despite this terrible betrayal, Fiera must make the choice to save Peter from a tragic Morro Cruise boat fire, or let him perish with his fellow investigators. Told in alternating viewpoints, we hear Fiera and Peter each struggle against their deep attraction. Secrets, lies, even murder, lace this dark fantasy.

 

The Review

Twenty-two year-old Ivy Lorena is the nanny for Mrs. Cothbert’s spoiled young son on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When her employer gives her a rare week vacation along the Jersey Shore, Ivy is overjoyed. Even though she grew up in a Brooklyn, NY orphanage, she had rarely seen the ocean nor learned how to swim. All of that will soon change.

Ivy quickly makes friends with Dulcie, a rich girl from Madison, New Jersey and as the duo walk along the boardwalk, they note a sign in a window celebrating the owner’s first month in business—a card reading. Normally, Ivy wouldn’t try something like this, but it’s vacation time and she’s looking for adventure, more than she could ever imagine.

It’s the summer of 1932. America was deep into the Great Depression with bread lines snaking around blocks and the homeless camping out in parks. Catherine Stine’s historical novel, Witch of the Cards, offers a suspenseful story of the occult as well as an enchanting love story.

During that first séance we meet most of the cast of characters. Peter Dune is the proprietor of Tarot and Séance. He is extremely handsome and Ivy is drawn to him immediately. He is also not who he says he is. His assistant, Opal is a teenage girl with wise but sad eyes in need of a mentor. Latecomer to the séance, businesswoman Alyse Bone, is beautiful as well as mysterious.

Ivy hopes the card reading will give her a clue into her unknown origin and strange abilities she tells no one about. Hint to reader: Ivy was not disappointed.

In her 268-page thriller, written in Ivy’s voice, author Catherine Stine does a superb job keeping readers on the edge as Ivy learns her real birth name, Fiera, and her powers of intuition were inherited from a woman no one would want to call “Mom”.

Witch of Cards is one novel readers will have trouble putting down.

About the Author

Catherine Stine loves dark fantasy as can be seen in her sci-fi thriller companion novels Fireseed One and Ruby’s Fire. She figures she is drawn to this genre because her father used to read to her stories by Edgar Allen Poe when she was a child. When she’s not writing she speed walks, watches bad TV, and enjoys traveling to exotic locations. You can find her at www.catherinestine.com.

Pop’s Rating: