It's a cold, snowy night when a strange woman appears at
Fever Devlin's door claiming to be his wife. The problem is
that Fever has no memory of this woman and, besides, he's
engaged to the lovely Lucinda. He does let the woman in out
of the cold, though, and tries to make some sense out of her
story that just keeps getting weirder with every word she
utters. When she finally runs off into the night again, she
leaves Fever with a lot of unanswered questions.
Lucinda and his best friend, Skidmore, who is the sheriff of
Blue Mountain, Georgia, come right over to rescue Fever. The
problem is that the woman is gone and has left with a
promise to return to do Fever some bodily harm. So now no
one believes Fever.
The next morning, Lucinda introduces him to Dr. Ceridwen
Nelson, Ceri to her friends. She's a different breed of
psychiatrist and is now on board to stay with Fever and try
to help him sort things out. She's not even frightened away
when someone takes the first gunshot at her. She decides
that, together, she and Fever will get to the bottom of
what's going on even if that turns out to mean that Fever's
certifiably crazy.
Filled with some of the quirkiest and most entertaining
characters you're likely to find in any book anywhere,
DECEMBER'S THORN is a story that will have you shaking your
head in amazement one second, shivering in fright the next
along with plenty of those "What just happened here?"
moments. In short, it's a deliciously enthralling book that
keeps you guessing at all times as to whether or not writer
Phillip Depoy is really just pulling your leg a bit.
These characters are written so that you can literally hear
the southern twang of their accents when they talk. The
surroundings are so real that you feel the cold wind blowing
against you as the wet snowflakes kiss your face. DECEMBER'S
THORN is a book to run the gamut of emotions as well as
throwing in some fright tactics and humor. There's not a
moment that you're not totally caught up in the action
that's taking place.
While DECEMBER'S THORN is the latest in a series featuring
character Fever Devlin, it can still easily standalone for
readers who are just discovering this series. What it will
do, however, is make you want to rush out and buy the rest
of the books in the series and lock yourself away until
you've devoured every last one of them.
"December's thorn, cruelest in the wood, Will give no rose, but still draw blood" —Traditional Fever Devilin is an academic with a complicated past and an unusual view of the world. A folklorist by training, he's returned to his family home in Blue Mountain, a small town in the heart of Georgia's Appalachian Mountains, where nothing is ever quite what it seems, and the past is always complicated. Still recovering from a near-death experience, Fever is visited by a woman who claims to be his wife. And she's there to deliver some shocking news: Fever has a son. His friends don't really believe the woman exists—they think she's another hallucination of a mind still slowly recovering from a long-term coma. Fever's fiancée is torn between being outraged and concerned for his mental health. None of this is helped by the fact that Fever, even in the best of times, has a tendency to see things that others don't and that may not, strictly speaking, exist. But when someone starts shooting very real bullets from a very real rifle in Fever's direction, the one thing that everyone can agree upon is that there's something very deadly going on. All Fever has to do is sort out who is trying to kill him—and why—before they succeed.