If you love Christian Suspense novels with serial killers and possibly ghosts/demons running around, you’ll love Brandilyn Collins’ novel CORAL MOON (Zondervan 4/27/07), the second book in her Kanner Lake Series (note that is Kanner, not Tanner.)
If your interpretation of Php 4:8 and it’s command to only think on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous, or praiseworthy doesn’t include reading about a serial killer lose in small town, Idaho, well, consider yourself warned.
Before getting your underwear in a bunch, let’s stop and consider the first on that list: True. The truth isn’t always lovely. In fact, in this fallen world, it’s often quite ugly.
In evaluating a novel, I always look at the deeper theological truths conveyed and whether the novel reveals something about the reality of sin, or condones it. Surprisingly, in my time as a reviewer, the sin I’ve most commonly seen winked at in Christian fiction is lying and deception. As a genre, we really need to work on our disturbing tendency towards situational ethics.
But I didn’t spot any of the usual theological concerns. Some won’t like the ghost activity; neither does Collins. A discerning reader of faith will catch on pretty quickly that she’s setting it up so demons are the true culprits behind supernatural phenomena. If anything, this book serves as a dire warning against the occult.
It’s also far more exciting than the last sermon the reader has heard on the subject (if they’ve heard any.) She’s clearly a master in her genre, not to mention the craft in general (Coral Moon should meet even the most rigorous standards), and at keeping the reader guessing (and throwing us off track, too.) I should have known better to fall for her tricks, but she even got me.
If you didn’t read Violet Dawn, and don’t have objections to the genre, don’t be put off by the “2†on the spine. It aroused a mild curiosity of what the heroine’s friend had suffered in the events surrounding a previous case evidently from the first book that are never fully explained. But regardless of the curiosity we writers love to raise in order to tempt our readers to buy the previous title as well, Coral Moon stands on it’s own two feet quite well.