BOOK REVIEW: Book of Night by Holly Black

Publication Date: May 3, 2022 Format: Kindle Genre:  Fantasy/Occult Horror

Publisher: Tor Books Length: 308 pages Buy: Kindle | Audio

Synopsis

Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make.

She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie Hall.

Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past mistakes, but getting out isn’t easy. Bartending at a dive, she’s still entirely too close to the corrupt underbelly of the Berkshires. Not to mention that her sister Posey is desperate for magic, and that Charlie's shadowless, and possibly soulless, boyfriend has been hiding things from her. When a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie descends into a maelstrom of murder and lies.

Determined to survive, she’s up against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, gloamists, and the people she loves best in the world—all trying to steal a secret that will give them vast and terrible power.

Review: 

I love this new world of Holly Black's.  Where shadows can "quicken" and become separate from the person but yet still tethered to them. Not everyone has this gift but those that do are the elite. Charlie Hall is a thief who specializes in acquiring magical books for different members of the Gloams. She is excellent at what she does but has taken time off after being shot. 

Now she lives with her sister, who reads tarot over the computer and is desperate to quicken her shadow, her boyfriend Vince who lost his shadow and is hiding something but she doesn't want to know what. 

After witnessing the aftermath of a horrific murder she becomes curious and starts looking into the person who died which leads a very powerful Gloamer to her door.  Now it is a race against time to find a book no one has seen, find her boyfriend who left her after a fight, and save herself and her loved ones from being victims to a billionaire with a god complex. 

Unique and brilliant this story takes a minute to fall into but once you are there you get swept away.  There are chapters that take you back to Charlies past and ones that take you back in Vinces. Each is a piece of a puzzle that makes them who they are.  Ultimately Charlie doesn't care who Vince was in the past but knows she wants him in her future...if she has one. 

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