Description
Gavin Fellowes, a damaged WWI veteran turned cynical psychic investigator, arrives in Ker-Ys, a Utopian art colony in Woodstock, NY, to investigate a series of purported fairy kidnappings of Communist garment workers who have taken over the failed Overlook Mountain House above the village. He is rapidly confronted with the willful blind spots of the well-meaning artists and the burgeoning anti-Semitism of the Catskills. With the help of Kate Ames, an illustrator and dazzlepaint designer who once might have been kidnapped by the fairies herself, Gavin must dig beneath the myth and legend to uncover an all-too-real occult threat that looms over Europe in the aftermath of the Great War.
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Erica Obey is the author of Dazzlepaint, as well as four other historical and paranormal novels set in the Hudson Valley, including the award-winning The Curse of the Braddock Brides, which Publishers Weekly called a “smoothly unfolding, satisfyingly twisty tale of lurid legends, deadly blackmail, hidden identities, international spycraft, and practical romance.” She is also working on a contemporary cozy series featuring a Hudson Valley librarian and her AI sidekick, which could best be described as Knives Out meets Ready Player One. Erica has served on the MWA-NY Board as the Chair of the Mentor Program Committee and is the 2020 Chapter President. She has also served as the Chair of the 2018 Edgars Best Novel Committee. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and taught college-level classes on fairy tale and fantasy, mystery fiction, and Arthurian romance, before she decided she’d rather be writing the stories herself. But once an academic, always an academic, and she remains a dedicated research junkie both in the depths of dusty archives and out on the hiking trails of the Catskill Mountains. She enjoys posting her explorations on her “Of Research and Rabbit Holes” blog, as well as on social media. Erica Obey
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In 1919, Gavin Fellowes, a representative of the Society of Psychical Research and the cynical hero of this sprightly paranormal mystery from Obey (The Curse of the Braddock Brides), comes to Woodstock, N.Y., summoned by Mrs. Jean Storrs Adams. A wealthy do-gooder and the founder of a local artists’ colony, Mrs. Adams wants Gavin to investigate whether some magical creature haunts the colony’s bathing pool and “is snatching young girls away to their doom.” Judith , a teenage girl who recently went missing, has been found dead, though others who vanished before Judith have all returned unharmed. Gavin joins Kate Ames, a highly successful book illustrator specializing in the rendering of fairies, in a quest for answers that involve Communists, Kaiser Wilhelm, Lord Kitchener, Masons, anti-Semites, artists, trade unionists, and all manner of “bogies, bogles, boggarts, abbey lubbers and buttery spirits.” The elevated diction helps set the fairy tale mood. Obey confidently mixes folklore, history, and conspiracy theories. Even skeptics will have fun. (Feb.)
Publishers Weekly