Wild Man’s Curse
Wilds
of the Bayou, #1
by Susannah
Sandlin
Date of Publication: April 5TH
2016
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Cover Artist: Michael Rehder
Genre: Romantic Suspense
From The Book Junkie Reads . . . Wild Man Curse (Wilds of the Bayou, #1) . . .
Murder. Mystery. Suspense. Oh, yeah. . . a little slow burning romance on the side. Voodoo, Louisiana, a priestess, a curse, bloody bodies, death threats, secrets, passion and damn no real jurisdiction in any of this action. Whiskey Bayou, LA has a little something brewing in its pots. Gentry has something brewing in his brain. He thinks he sees what he knows that he could not have seen but want proof that he had see what he seen. Make sense? Good. You will find more in these pages than just your everyday romantic suspense. There was depth, vivid depictions, and intense characterization.
A family curse in the bayou was not uncommon the Louisianan region. There was no reason to take this one to be any different but there was something about it. Something that made it stand out.
There are rich characters. Detailed oriented procedures of law enforcement and investigation. There was no half-assing it here. There was apparent attention paid to how the scenarios played out. Our hero was a first for me a wildlife officer on the hunt for poachers. He had some skills. This was most certainly a read about the man. I found the woman to be developed but more of a secondary character to her male counterpart. Celestine had a more prominent role than that of a secondary character. I just felt more focused on Gentry.
**This ARC was provided via
Bewitching Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.**
BLURB
The bones said death was comin’, and
the bones never lied.
While on an early morning patrol in
the swamps of Whiskey Bayou, Louisiana wildlife agent Gentry Broussard spots a
man leaving the home of voodoo priestess Eva Savoie—a man who bears a startling
resemblance to his brother, whom Gentry thought he had killed during a drug
raid three years earlier. Shaken, the agent enters Eva’s cabin and makes a
bloody discovery: the old woman has been brutally murdered.
With no jurisdiction over the case,
he’s forced to leave the investigation to the local sheriff, until Eva’s
beautiful heir, Celestine, receives a series of gruesome threats. As Gentry’s
involvement deepens and more victims turn up, can he untangle the secrets
behind Eva’s murder and protect Celestine from the same fate?
Or will an old family curse finally
have its way?
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Depository | IndieBound
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it
into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grandpere Julien had built the place
more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing
them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across every day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but
she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations
had started with her grandfather and what he’d done all those years ago.
What he’d brought with him to Whiskey
Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her
mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva’s brother Antoine to
drown in the bayou only a half-mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant
son behind.
What stalked Eva now.
The bones said death was coming and, once Eva was gone, the
curse should go with her. No one else knew the secrets of Julien Savoie and
this cabin and that box full of sin he’d dug out of the bayou mud back in Isle
de Jean Charles.
Might take a while, but sin catches up with you. Always had.
Always would. And the curse had driven Eva to sin. Oh yes, she had sinned.
She’d known her reckoning would catch up with her, although
it had taken a good long time. She’d turned seventy-eight yesterday, or was it
eighty? She couldn’t remember for sure, and the bones said it didn’t matter
now.
On the scarred wooden table before Eva sat three burning
candles that filled the room with the soft, soothing glow of melting tallow.
She’d made them herself, infusing them with the oil of the fragrant lilies that
every spring spread a bright green carpet over the lazy, brown water of the
bayou. The tools of her ritual sat on an ancient square of tanned hide passed
down through generations of holy ones, of those blessed by the gods with the
ability to throw the bones.
A small mound of delicate chicken bones, yellowed and
fragile from age, lay inside the circle of light cast by the candles. Daylight
would come in an hour or so, but Eva didn’t expect to last that long. Death was
even now making his way toward her.
She leaned forward, wincing at the stab of pain in her lower
back. Since the first throw of the bones had whispered her fate two days ago,
she’d been cleaning. Scrubbed the floor, worn smooth by decades of bare feet.
Washed the linens, folding them in neat piles in a drawer at the bottom of the
old pie safe. Discarded most of the food in the little refrigerator that sat in
the corner. Dragged the bag of trash down the long, overgrown drive past
LeRoy’s old 1970 Chevy pickup that she still drove up to Houma for groceries
and such once a month. Left the white bag at the side of the parish road for
the weekly trash collection.
She’d spit on LeRoy’s truck as she passed it because she
couldn’t spit on the man who bought it. He was long gone.
Now the cleaning had been finished. Whoever discovered her
raggedy old body wouldn’t find a mess, not in Eva Savoie’s house.
A few minutes ago, with the old cabin as clean as she was
capable of making it, she’d thrown the bones one last time. Part of her hoped
they’d read different, hoped she’d be granted a few more days of grace.
But the bones still whispered death. Eva accepted it, and
she sat, and she waited. At least the girl, Celestine, would inherit a
cleaned-up house. The girl, Antoine’s granddaughter, knew nothing of the
secrets, nothing of the curse. Eva had made sure of that….
Eva waited for her heart to fail—that seemed to be her most
likely way to go. As she rocked she noted each steady beat, biding her time for
the instant when the thump-thump-thump
would falter and her breath would catch, then stop. She reckoned it would hurt
a little, but what if it did? The curse had doled out worse ends to those who
came before her.
She’d doled out worse herself.
The buzz of a boat’s motor sounded from outside the cabin,
faint but growing louder. Wardens on patrol already, most likely.
The boat’s engine grew louder, finally coming to an abrupt
stop so near, it had to be right outside her door. Silence filled the room once
again, until through her bones she felt the thud of someone jumping onto the
porch that wrapped around the cabin. The porch formed the platform on which the
house sat, linking it to the spit of land behind it when the water was normal.
When storms blew through, it provided an island on which the cabin could sit
or, if need be, float.
As heavy footfalls crossed the porch, Eva struggled to her
feet. Every pop and crackle of her joints knifed streaks of pain through her
limbs as they protested the cleaning they’d done, followed by the sitting.
Prob’ly a game warden, checkin’ on her. Too bad he hadn’t
stopped a little later, after she was gone. She didn’t like to think of her
body having to bake in the hot cabin for days before anyone found her.
But the curse was what it was, and the bones said what they
said.
The knock, when it came, was soft, and Eva reached the door
with the help of a sturdy cane she’d carved herself. Opening the door, she
squinted into the glare of a flashlight that seemed almost blinding after the
soft light of the candles. She peered up at a young man with eyes that gleamed
from beneath the hood of a jacket. He was not a game warden, and it was too hot
for a jacket.
“Who are you?” Her voice cracked. She knew who he was. He
was Death.
“The devil come to pay you a visit, Eva.” The man’s voice
was smooth as silk, smooth as a lie, smooth as death itself. “And you know what
the devil wants.”
She knew what he wanted, and she knew the only way to end
the curse was to deny him.
She’d been granted no easy passing by the Savoie curse after
all, but she would die today.
The bones never lied.
Buy Links:
Amazon | B&N | Book Depository | IndieBound
Author Info
Susannah Sandlin is the author of the
award-winning Penton Vampire Legacy paranormal romance series, including the
2013 Holt Medallion Award-winning Absolution and Omega and Allegiance, which
were nominated for the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Award in 2014 and 2015,
respectively. She also writers The Collectors romantic suspense series,
including Lovely, Dark, and Deep, 2015 Holt Medallion winner and 2015
Booksellers Best Award winner. Her new series Wilds of the Bayou starts in 2016
with the April 5 release of Wild Man’s Curse. Writing as Suzanne Johnson,
Susannah is the author of the award-winning Sentinels of New Orleans urban
fantasy series. A displaced New Orleanian, she currently lives in Auburn,
Alabama. Susannah loves SEC football, fried gator on a stick, all things Cajun,
and redneck reality TV.
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