![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ghostly Rings and Skeleton Keys
Nov. 28th, 2025 10:18 pmThe Seven Rings by Nora Roberts is the completion of her Lost Brides trilogy, which I've been waiting a year for - and it didn't disappoint! I love the set of characters working together to break the curse in these books - even if they didn't actually properly start working on that until 90% through the third book... I'm sure a lot of readers will have been frustrated throughout this series by the lengthy, drawn-out, mostly mundane nature of the story - but I actually really enjoyed all the stuff with the pets and the characters working on their businesses and the gradual romance and the sailing and the small town community building, etc. The periodic intrusions of the evil ghost were what annoyed me more than anything because it was just so repetitive. A character would be alone in the house, the ghost would frighten or threaten them (often by trapping them in one of the rooms and throwing things at them), they would escape, the other characters would rush round to help and arrive after the fact, and the affected character would explain what happened - over and over and over again, which did get a bit wearing.
And then, when we finally got to the breaking of the curse, it was all over extremely quickly and felt way too easy, with not nearly enough aftermath. Still, those minor annoyances aside, I really enjoyed this whole series overall, and there was a lot to love about how everything got wrapped up in this instalment. I've completed another Nora Roberts trilogy with a very similar format and plot in the interim, so I may not be visiting more of her back catalogue for a while, but I'll definitely give the next trilogy a try when the first one inevitably comes out in November 2026.
The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly has been on my wishlist for a while, since someone at a reading retreat recommended it to me ages ago - and then I spotted it in a local charity shop last week and immediately read it, since I was looking for a book to round out the month.
It tells the story of Frank Churcher, who writes a book of imagined folklore, with a complex puzzle built into it in the 1970s, which captures the imagination of a group of treasure hunters, who get dangerously obsessed with solving the mystery. This puts various of Frank's family in danger over the ensuing decades, until he decides to stage a media event around the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication and things derail even further in unexpected ways.
The book is less thriller-y than I expected - in a good way - and much more layered and involving, with a split timeline gradually building up the history of events, and complex family relationships evolving and devolving over the course of the book.
I really liked the main POV character, Nell, Frank's oldest daughter, and the development of her arc with her foster daughter was my favourite aspect of the book. The main mystery was still compelling, though it got a bit too drawn out towards the end. Things didn't resolve the way I was expecting, though, and there were some complex moral aspects to the conclusion that were really interesting.
This kept me engaged throughout and I read it pretty quickly, though I was never tempted to skim.
And then, when we finally got to the breaking of the curse, it was all over extremely quickly and felt way too easy, with not nearly enough aftermath. Still, those minor annoyances aside, I really enjoyed this whole series overall, and there was a lot to love about how everything got wrapped up in this instalment. I've completed another Nora Roberts trilogy with a very similar format and plot in the interim, so I may not be visiting more of her back catalogue for a while, but I'll definitely give the next trilogy a try when the first one inevitably comes out in November 2026.
The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly has been on my wishlist for a while, since someone at a reading retreat recommended it to me ages ago - and then I spotted it in a local charity shop last week and immediately read it, since I was looking for a book to round out the month.
It tells the story of Frank Churcher, who writes a book of imagined folklore, with a complex puzzle built into it in the 1970s, which captures the imagination of a group of treasure hunters, who get dangerously obsessed with solving the mystery. This puts various of Frank's family in danger over the ensuing decades, until he decides to stage a media event around the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication and things derail even further in unexpected ways.
The book is less thriller-y than I expected - in a good way - and much more layered and involving, with a split timeline gradually building up the history of events, and complex family relationships evolving and devolving over the course of the book.
I really liked the main POV character, Nell, Frank's oldest daughter, and the development of her arc with her foster daughter was my favourite aspect of the book. The main mystery was still compelling, though it got a bit too drawn out towards the end. Things didn't resolve the way I was expecting, though, and there were some complex moral aspects to the conclusion that were really interesting.
This kept me engaged throughout and I read it pretty quickly, though I was never tempted to skim.
