Author: Christopher Rice
Book Name: Bone Music
Release Date: March 1, 2018
Series: The Burning Girl
Order: #1
Genre: Suspense/Thriller/SciFi
Overall SPA: 3.5 Stars
Blurb: Charlotte Rowe spent the first seven years of her life in the hands of the only parents she knew—a pair of serial killers who murdered her mother and tried to shape Charlotte in their own twisted image. If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.
Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.
Main SPA Evaluation Areas:
Characters: 3.5/5 Stars
Believability: 3.5/5 Stars
Personal Opinion: 4/5 Stars
I was skeptical about picking this one up , so I’m a little bit surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this. I think I kind of expected something that leaned a little heavier towards the gore or horror side, so the fact that it didn’t was a big positive for me.
Even though I’m not normally a big science fiction fan, this one really only kind of touches on that genre (doesn’t even show as being in it in most locations), so that also added another little bonus for me because that touch is interesting.
The base nature of the story annihilates the believability boundaries, but what you are given is presented in a way that all the parts surrounding it work well even outside those boundaries. I liked how the drug in this is presented because it has a different kind of impact than what I’ve seen in stories based on that “exposure to something toxic or experimental” trope in the past. It brings it back into the realm of possibility.
I think I kind of expected to not like this because it isn’t exactly my norm, but I really did. I’ll be grabbing the next book in the series to see if it can live up to the first.
TJ Fox: Sharing the Experience 