Lost Souls (Reviver trilogy book 2) by Seth Patrick (book review).
In the last 12 months, the Afterlifers have discovered new funding and started making life difficult for revivers like Jonah to do their job: briefly waking the dead for a final goodbye or to help police catch their killers. Jonah is fed up with the hassle, still having nightmares about the Michael Andreas incident and finding it difficult to keep his relationship with Annabel alive. Hearing rumours that the government are planning to restart the Baseline Project to research the science of revival, Jonah is naturally curious about the new opportunity but something doesn’t feel quite right. When strange deaths start occurring and demonic shadows fill not only his nightmares but also his waking hours, Jonah and his team must figure out what’s happening before it’s too late.
Occurring some months after the events of ‘Reviver’ (later sold as ‘The Reviver’ in an inexplicable name alteration), ‘Lost Souls’ is the second book in Seth Patrick’s series featuring the reviver Jonah Miller. I definitely found myself wishing that I’d read the first book more recently or that there was a brief recap in the beginning, although these recaps seem to have fallen out of favour of late and I’m sure they used to be more common. Anyway, I eventually caught up with the various characters, even if it did take me a while to re-orient myself!
‘Lost Souls’ definitely has a darker tone to it than ‘Reviver’ and I wouldn’t hesitate to put this in the horror section, where I might have said the first book was a kind of urban paranormal fantasy. The monsters in this one are pretty creepy, covering everything from violent serial killing to end of the world kind of events and watching Jonah and his friends battle through the various events certainly kept me turning the pages.
However, I think this was a bit of a letdown after the brilliance of the first book. I understand that the characters had been through some tough times and were finding it difficult to cope, but a lot of the time they just felt flat. I enjoyed the story well enough and thought the level of evil in there was great but, again, a lot of it seemed to be the characters just going through the motions, so I found it hard to become engaged in the story.
Maybe my expectations were too high or maybe it had been too long since I read the first book for me to be able to get into this. I did enjoy ‘Lost Souls’ and am looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy, but it didn’t match the level of the first book. Hopefully it all picks up again in book 3‘The Dead Road’!
Vinca Russell
May 2017
(pub: Pan Macmillan. 384 page paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-44721-341-3)
check out website: www.panmacmillan.com/
