Princess of Wands - Hardcover

Ringo, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416509232 ISBN 13: 9781416509233

Publisher: Baen, 2006

Synopsis

Buffy meets Desperate Housewives meets killer demons! Fast-moving fantasy action from a New York Times best-selling master of edge-of-the-seat adventure.

Special: distinguished by some unusual quality . . .
Circumstances: a piece of evidence that indicates the probability or improbability of an event . . .
Barbara Everette, homemaker living in a small town in Mississippi, had the perfect life. Perfect husband, perfect children, perfect house, perfect Christian Faith. She cooked and cleaned perfectly and managed all of the chores of the modern suburbanite, toting the kids, running the PTA, teaching kung-fu in the local dojo . . . Perfectly. But perfection has a price and the day came when Barbara snapped. She simply had to have "one weekend off." God had to grant her that much. It said no where that she was a slave. Waving goodbye to her hapless, entirely undomestic husband, she set out on the quest for a weekend of peace and maybe some authentic Cajun food.
Detective Sergeant Kelly Lockhart, New Orleans Homicide, had a perfect record on his latest case: not a single suspect. And there should be at least five or six, given the DNA traces on the many bodies. Furthermore, his sole really outstanding clue, a mysterious fish scale, had disappeared into the recesses of the FBI Crime Lab. But the old fortune-teller was sending him into the bayou, down in the land of authentic Cajun food, on the track of a mysterious pimp with the admonition to "watch for the Princess." Or die. Barbara and Kelly were heading to a rendezvous that might be fate and might reveal the hand of God. There was more cooking in the swamps than jambalaya. Unknown to either, the mystery of the Bayou Ripper had Special Circumstances.

About this title

About the Author

John Ringo is the New York Times best-selling author of the Black Tide Rising series, the Posleen War series, the Through the Looking Glass series, and more, including the Troy Rising series, of which Live Free or Die is the first installment. A veteran of the 82nd Airborne, Ringo brings firsthand knowledge of military operations to his fiction.

Reviews

Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans will appreciate Barbara Everett, a Mississippi soccer mom who discovers in Ringo's latest, which is less a novel than three linked episodes, that there are things undreamed of in the PTA handbook. In part one, Barbara's ability to take care of an alien infestation straight out of H.P. Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth" brings her to the attention of a shadowy group that assists the FBI in supernatural cases. They recruit her for a spiritual SWAT team that deals with what secular authorities cannot. As in Ghost (2005), another three-parter, Ringo explores the paradox of using violence against evil: it's necessary, but it can change the fighter into what she fights if she lacks a strong enough moral compass. Ringo portrays his heroine's strong Christian faith sympathetically without being preachy. The second and longest episode, a roman à clef about a necromancer slaying attendees at a science fiction convention, will chiefly delight those in on the joke. In the brief third episode, Barbara confronts an evil that strikes close to home and discovers how puny Darkness's tools really are compared to those of Light. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Baen
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416509232
• ISBN 13: 9781416509233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336