Hidden Salem
by Kay Hooper
Kindle Edition, 304 pages
Expected publication: April 7th 2020 by Berkley
Goodreads synopsis:
A town shrouded in the occult. An evil that lurks in the dark. The SCU returns in a hair-raising novel from New York Times bestselling author Kay Hooper.
Nellie Cavendish has very good reasons to seek out her roots, and not only because she has no memory of her mother and hardly knew the father who left her upbringing to paid caregivers. In the eight years since her twenty-first birthday, very odd things have begun to happen. Crows gather near her wherever she goes, electronics short out when she touches them, and when she’s upset, really upset, it storms. At first, she chalked up the unusual happenings to coincidence, but that explanation doesn't begin to cover the vivid nightmares that torment her. She can no longer pretend to ignore them. She has to find out the truth. And the only starting point she has is a mysterious letter from her father delivered ten years after his death, insisting she go to a town called Salem and risk her life to stop some unnamed evil. Before her thirtieth birthday.
As a longtime member of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit, Grayson Sheridan has learned not to be surprised by the unusual and the macabre--but Salem is different. Evidence of Satanic activities and the disappearance of three strangers to the town are what brought Salem to the attention of the SCU, and when Gray arrives to find his undercover partner vanished, he knows that whatever’s hiding in the seemingly peaceful little town is deadly. But what actually hides in the shadows and secrets of Salem is unlike anything the agents have ever encountered.
***
4.5 Stars
This is the 19th book in the Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series by Kay Hooper.
Kay Hooper is always a favorite read of mine. When I need a guilty pleasure book, she is an author I turn to in a pinch.
Basic premise: Nellie Cavandish has a history in Salem. She is a descendant of one of the five founding families. She barely knew her parents who left her in the hands of caregivers. On her 21st birthday she began to notice strange things. Crows always surround her and storms come and go depending on her moods. She has come to Salem on the eve of her 30th birthday looking for answers to all these unusual happenings.
Bishop, head of the Special Crimes Unit, has sent in Grayson and Geneva separately to investigate. Geneva gets kidnapped by a faction in town who are aligned with this book’s Big Bad. Geneva, Grayson and Nellie have to work together to bring down this Big Bad and free the crows and the townspeople from his villainy.
The backstory in this was pretty intense and lengthy. While I understand you need to relate a lot of this to have the book make more sense, I felt like so much was overkill. It seemed like the story didn’t really start until halfway through. By then I was finally getting a grasp about what this premise was about and who the main players were. With these Bishop novels, there are usually different main characters even though Bishop does always play a significant part as the boss of the unit.
For the people who have never read a Bishop novel, I thought a bit more should have gone into that particular backstory since the whole premise of his group is a little bizarre.
But overall, a very good read that I highly recommend you trying!
If you love a good mystery/thriller with some supernatural/paranormal aspects, definitely try this one on for size. You won’t be disappointed.
I received this as an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) in return for an honest review. I thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for allowing me to read this title.
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