Black Fall by Andrew Mayne – Review

Published: March 21, 2017

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks

Series: Jessica Blackwood #3

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Pages: 368 (Paperback)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

Synopsis:
In Black Fall, the third book in the ITW Award-nominated series that began with self-published eBook phenomenon Angel Killer, magician-turned-FBI agent Jessica Blackwood investigates a series of seemingly unrelated, but equally bizarre and sinister, crimes that lead her to the Colorado desert and a town that has, simply, disappeared.

With two big cases under her belt, FBI Agent Jessica Blackwood is learning to embrace her unconventional past as the rising star in a family dynasty of illusionists. Her talent and experience endow her with a unique understanding of the power and potential of deception, and a gift for knowing when things are not always as they appear to be. Once resenting her eccentric grandfather, a brilliant magician in his own right, Jessica now sees him as a mentor and regularly seeks his advice about her work. But Jessica’s routine surveillance operation becomes a fight for survival when a disturbed young woman, clutching a baby, shows up at the stake-out location and threatens to kill her child. On the same day, an hour after a severe earthquake rocks the eastern seaboard, a strange video goes viral. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Devon has been dead for eight years, yet here he is on camera, predicting the location and date of the earthquake. Jessica is put on the case by her boss, Dr. Ailes, but when Detective Aileen Lewis reports that they’ve found a Jane Doe who matches her description of her attacker, she’s torn between professional duty and a personal desire to find out who the woman was, and why she was killed.The investigations pull her in very different directions–until they start to converge, leading Jessica to confront something darker, and more powerful, than anyone expected. Something so twisted, only one person could be behind it…the Warlock.

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And now to wrap up the Jessica Blackwood reviews! Black Fall is the concluding entry to the Jessica Blackwood trilogy and wow, does it go out with a bang! If the stakes weren’t high enough for you in the first two books, this should be more than enough to WOW you.  This time around the safety of the world is at stake and a mere button press could tilt the world into chaos.

The story starts off with a small Colorado town that has disappeared off the map – there’s simply no trace of it. While this is certainly a strange situation, it actually gets moved to the back burner in favor of some other situations for much of the story. When Jessica is nearly assassinated by a woman who literally shows up on her doorstep then that same woman is found murdered, the plot focuses there instead. And let’s not forget the video that surfaces of a dead physicist predicting the massive earthquake that just occurred! There’s suspicion that an environmental cult may be involved, though the exact reasons behind it are suspect – is the Warlock in play again, despite being in jail? So much happens in this book that I can’t remember it all very well… I really shouldn’t procrastinate my reviews for so long!

I’ll be keeping this brief since I’ve forgotten so many details already. The stakes are higher than ever, but in this case I didn’t care for it as much. I prefer the slightly smaller scale cases where the whole world isn’t about to be thrown into chaos by an environmental terrorism cult. Somehow, even though those other cases are equally improbable, they still seemed believable while this story was a bit too wild for me. It was still good, but in my opinion is the weakest of the installments and I found myself skimming (technically fast forwarding) through sections of the audiobook. I just didn’t really care because it was on a massive scale and you sort of lose the human connection (and it also feels like the craziness the world is going through now). So no, I didn’t love this one as much but it was interesting and I still enjoyed it overall AND it was a good set up for Mastermind and the return of the Warlock.