Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (Brentwood, TN: CamCat Books, 2021). ISBN: 9780744304947 Every so often—and it is, as it should be, very rare—I read a book for review and think, “If only there were six stars in the rating system, instead of five…” So imagine my surprise when I realized that this is the author’s debut novel. It is admittedly a perfect storm for me, as a reader, paranormal researcher and experiencer, and a creative. It combines the gumshoe detective genre of the 1940s with the birth of Las Vegas and UFOs. Those are some rich ingredients for a novel, and Holmes combines them like a master pastry chef into a true guilty pleasure. The novel opens in June 1947, at the time of the fabled Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident. As that craft is (crash) landing, a livestock agent/special ranger named Jefferson Sharp witnesses a similar event in Texas. This is a multilayered inciting incident, not only kicking off the central narrative of the mystery of the UFO sightings, but delivering a trip...

  (Next Chapter, 2021). ISBN: 9781006495731 “Buy me a drink, Becker, and I will tell you a story.” (Part Three) Spanning four decades in three parts, Tom Vater’s Kolkata Noir is a good old-fashioned detective story with the addition of a love affair never enacted and abundant socioeconomic and political commentary. Part One takes place in 1999 in Calcutta, India. Although thoughts of a hellish place and the Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta! immediately come to mind, the author tells us in the Acknowledgments that “[d]uring the Raj [the period of British rule from 1858 until the independence of India in 1947], Calcutta was the world’s second most economically powerful metropolis.” The story opens with the hunt for suspects in the brutal back-alley murder of Abir Roychowdhury, a powerful and wealthy man whose wife, Paulami, a socialite and well known in her own right, is unfaithful with two men, one of whom—an Englishman—is the principle suspect. Leading the investigation is In...