strange and random happenstance: Plot Hole

The Midnight Pack by Jasmine Kuliasha
Published by: Orbit
Publication Date: May 27th, 2025
Format: eBook, 352 Pages
Rating: ★
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Jericho James has made a name for herself. Not the name she'd have necessarily chosen when she became a P.I. but when you become the foremost investigator in debunking cryptids, you embrace that rep. Also, it's never Cthulhu, it's almost always snakes. Occasionally an octopus. She should know, she's from Florida. Only once before has she investigated a case with a fatality. A case she'll never forget. Which is why when she's called to Stillbridge, Maine, to investigate the death of a college graduate who was hiking the Appalachian Trail who met a gruesome end she takes her job seriously. The locals assume it's a bear attack but the sheriff isn't quite so certain. Neither is the young boy Mikey who approaches Jericho to ask if she's there to kill the monster. In fact Mikey is soon her best source for information in the small town. Though she should have listened to him and never gone into the woods. But she needed to see the scene of the crime. And, according to the sheriff, the local hermit, Kermit, lives out in the depths of the forest, miles beyond the scene of the crime, and might be able to help. So she's off to find Kermit the hermit. Only Jericho has miscalculated the number of hours of daylight needed for her trek and only gets as far as the scene of the crime when she realizes she'll need to turn back. Of course that's exactly when she's attacked. Chased from the clearing she falls into a ravine and twists her ankle before she succumbs to darkness. She awakes the next day to sunlight streaming in through a window under a veritable mountain of blankets. Soon her rescuer makes an appearance. It turns out Kermit isn't such a hermit after all. He lives with his three sons, Benjamin, Theo, and Seth. It's Benjamin that Jericho is instantly drawn to. Neither of them can deny their chemistry. She is reluctantly, by some, welcomed into the Grey family compound. This isn't just a shack in the woods; there's terraces and gardens, patios and a gym, and a state of the art laboratory. Because these four men, who have been living in secret without any female presence since Kermit's wife and the boys' mother died five years earlier, are scientists. They are looking to fully eradicate a bloodborne pathogen. Not just keep it controlled like scientists can now do with HIV, but eliminate it completely. Their work is well funded and secret. Which is fine by Jericho. She can heal, do some research in their vast library, and ogle Benjamin. That is until it's brought home to her by some otherworldly forces that her hosts might be more dangerous than she thought. She really should have listened to Mikey.

This book had such a solid start; Jericho James arrives in Maine and befriends a child who knows all about the monsters in the woods and I literally had goosebumps. The Midnight Pack had all the hallmarks of Stephen King with a hint of Something is Killing the Children and then Jericho went into the woods and it became Twilight. Only somehow not even as good as Twilight if you dare to imagine that. Oh, and if you're wondering, Jericho knows all about Twilight and apparently learned nothing from Stephenie Meyer. Longing looks and losing her brain were what followed for the next couple hundred pages. I literally just couldn't with this book. It's like her desire overrode all capacity for rational thinking. How are they doing research without a computer? Do you think maybe they lied about not having one? Or about not having a phone? Or about exactly how you ended up injured? But then again, she debunks cryptids for a living and didn't even know what a wendigo is. A wendigo! If you Google cryptid it's literally the eleventh cryptid listed. AND might I add, this is with Google totally not working right anymore because of AI. Yes yes, we can argue that technically a wendigo isn't a cryptid, but the fact she'd never heard of one beggars belief. In fact I was hoping the killer would be like a wendigo/werewolf hybrid called a wendiwoof, but no, I did not get my wish, and while other people have done this type of hybrid they didn't name it the wendiwoof so I am claiming copyright. The ignorance of our heroine time and time again is just infuriating. Jasmine Kuliasha could of at least had some fun with Jericho being the personification of a dumb blonde, but she was just wanting to turn this into a romance, cue the heavy petting. And no. This book isn't sophisticated enough for this joke. I mean, it literally took over half the book for werewolf to even be uttered when it's on the freaking cover. And yes, I know that characters aren't self-aware, this isn't Thursday Next, but come on. Then again Jericho isn't even properly kitted out for a walk in the woods, always wearing just exercise tights and a tank top, maybe a light flannel. This is fall. In MAINE! Ugh, she is just too dumb to live. Let Benjamin's brothers have at her. But Jericho is only as ignorant as her creator. I didn't keep track of each and every infraction, it would have ended up longer than the book especially with how the house didn't seem to abide by the blueprints or the laws of physics. So let's go with the biggest one. A werewolf pack has a one out one in rule. So if they lose a member of the pack they have to be replaced. When Jericho kills the villainous brother the pack is worried she will be forced into becoming a werewolf to replace him. But hang on a minute. Five years earlier Kermit's wife, a werewolf, died. No one replaced her. So, um, what's with that? In fact what's with all of this. I just want to forget I ever read it. Sadly the worse the book the longer it remains.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: An Urban Development, Appalachian Trail, Cryptids, Cthulhu, Jasmine Kuliasha, Jericho James, Maine, Mikey, Plot Hole, Something is Killing the Children, Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer, The Midnight Pack, Twilight, Wendigo, Werewolf

The Mitford Trial by Jessica Fellowes
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: January 19th, 2021
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Louisa Sullivan is finally Louisa Cannon. Her and Guy's wedding was the best day of her life. Until a couple of the Mitfords snuck off to Sir Oswald Mosley's BUF rally and her husband was called in to police said rally. But a wedding isn't a marriage. And Louisa is finding it a harder adjustment than she would have thought no matter how almost perfect the big day was. Living with her in-laws, if only temporarily, is a strain, especially when her mother-in-law is constantly complaining about her to Guy. Not that Guy would ever hurt Louisa by telling her this, she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and overhears them. But despite how hard her newly married life is at least she's not playing dogsbody to the Mitfords. Nancy practically begged Louisa to go on a cruise with Lady Redesdale, Diana, and Unity. The plan being to keep Diana away from Sir Oswald until her divorce to Bryan Guinness is finalized. Just thinking about escaping that fate has put a spring in her step. Until she realizes someone is shadowing her steps. Very closely. She has seen the same man at her wedding, outside the Mitfords after she talked with Nancy, and now outside her stenography course. He eventually approaches her. His name is Iain and the government would like it very much if Louisa were to take Nancy up on the job offer and report back anything unusual that might happen on Diana and Unity's travels. Who they meet, what they talk about, general surveillance from someone who already has the access to get close to them. While Louisa hates the prospect of working for the Mitfords again, as well as keeping secrets from Guy, this might be the first time in her life she's been approached to do something that uses her unique skill set. She hesitates, but knows in her heart that she will accept. Who wouldn't want do their bit for king and country? The Princess Alice departs from Venice for an excursion around the Italian coast. The three Mitford women are in first class, while many flights below Louisa is very happy to have a bed and not a hammock like some of the lower class passengers. At first her job is nothing more than what she's done before, fetching and carrying while pretending she's invisible. Pretending to not notice Unity's attraction to a German SS officer while squirreling away the information for Iain. Ignoring Diana's mild obsession with the twice divorced woman down the hall and thinking that this couldn't possibly interest Iain. That is until the woman's husband is murdered. That's when Louisa tries to contact Iain and realizes she's in over her head. But thanks to her husband's well-timed arrival they can work the case together. Until she's told to look the other way. Until she's told that the truth could get her husband killed. Playing at spies is far more dangerous than she realized. And this isn't her first murder!

In long running series it's common for authors to have a series bible. This will help them remember basic details like descriptions of characters, ages, potted histories. This will not help them if they've forgotten the sun has already risen in the previous chapter or if a witness has already been called to the stand or if they somehow transported a boat from the east coast to the west coast of Italy defying space and time. Jessica Fellowes is in desperate need of this because she actually forgot the ENTIRE PLOT of the previous book in this series. Part of me was like, FFS, she did it again. Because as I've pointed out in previous volumes, she desperately needs an editor to remove all her anomalies, the above examples all being taken from this book, but forgetting the entire plot of The Mitford Scandal is a cut above. I kind of am in awe of this complete amnesia. So what exactly did Jessica Fellowes forget? She forgot that her last book was set entirely on the continent when Louisa was lady's maid to the newly married Diana Guinness. Because when Nancy approaches Louisa about the job offer in this book all Louisa can think about is how she's never traveled. She's lived a small life and never got to see the world before her marriage. In her own words she says she has "barely left England, bar a short trip to Dieppe with the Mitfords years and years ago." And that is by far not the only time she mentions this desire. The chance to see the world is just an added bonus for doing her bit for king and country. A world which she's already seen. As has her husband, because they ran into each other in Paris when Louisa was working there. There's a slight backtrack when Jessica Fellowes has Louisa musing on taking the night train to Paris a few times when she worked for Diana, but it was too little too late. So, why all the musings and wanderlust for a place she's forgotten she's been to? Your guess is as good as mine. I mean, if fictional characters could take a bump on the head I'd say that this happened to our heroine but instead it had to have happened to our author AND any of her beta readers. Because this is a serious plot hole. It's a gaping maw that it was hard to get past. But oddly for me, get past it I did. Why? Again, I couldn't explain it if I tried. It was a combination of Jessica Fellowes knowing that Nazis are bad and my love of a good gruesome death on a cruise ship. Last year at this time I was watching the entertaining, if flawed show, Death and Other Details, about murder on a Mediterranean ocean liner. The Mitford Trial hit the same note and made me feel a little nostalgic. This book isn't perfect and occasionally veers to the absurd with Louisa taking a catnap at a crime scene, but compared to the rest of this series, it was stellar.