See the Mystery Review Crew’s review of Awakening Macbeth by Carmen Amato
Awakening Macbeth
Author: Carmen Amato
Genre: Thriller, Paranormal
Historian Brodie Macbeth has a good life. She’s a respected professor at the University of Virginia, one half of a campus power couple, an athlete and the owner of a very smart dog.
But life unravels fast when her father, a fellow professor at the university, dies under mysterious circumstances. To make matters worse, her father’s will leaves Brodie with a strange inheritance, including a requirement to read his collection of British history books.
She wonders if she really knew the man who raised her.
As Brodie reads her way through her father’s library, the books bring on time-traveling nightmares unlike any dreams she’s ever had before. Sleep becomes a haunting dimension where Brodie is stalked by a sinister figure desperately demanding to know her father’s deepest secret.
As the line between reality and the past blurs, Brodie’s dreams grow increasingly dangerous. Each night, she’s trapped in the pages of her father’s books and facing death; at Waterloo facing Napoleon’s army, shipwrecked in the Antarctic with Ernest Shackleton, shivering in the Tower of London as Anne Boleyn’s executioner sharpens his axe.
Daytime brings a different complication when she falls for Joe Birnam, a battle-scarred veteran of the Iraq War. Their love story awakens a world of happy possibilities but is soon threatened by the realization that the nightmares are a game that could take not only Brodie’s life but also Joe’s immortal soul.
And the devil is running out of time.
Brodie must play a dangerous game of love versus evil, desperately unraveling her father’s double life before she loses everything. But how can she and Joe survive the game when the only person who knew how to win is dead?
Join Brodie and Joe on a heart-pounding journey through passion, peril, and the struggle between light and dark in this riveting paranormal romance.
Is love enough when it’s time to save your soul?
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Review of Awakening Macbeth
The title, Awakening MacBeth, hints that something interesting is afoot, and in this unusual paranormal mystery by Carmen Amato, indeed it is! Brodie MacBeth is a respected history professor at the University of Virginia, a world-renowned author, and the best half of the campus’ power couple. But, a phone call propels Brodie into a life-changing crisis when she learns that Professor William MacBeth, head of the History Department and her sole living parent, has fallen from a window in an apparent suicide. Brodie’s father has bequeathed her a very unique inheritance dependent upon her completion of several unusual demands. Brodie meets Joe Birnam while on a flight to her father’s native Scotland, and sparks fly! The ensuing love story is thoughtful and captivating, with the usual and anticipated missteps stemming from the unresolved relationship back at the university.
Brodie suddenly is plagued by horrific, lifelike dreams based on the books from her father’s library that she is reading. The dreams pull Brodie into a life-or-death struggle with a paranormal entity that is identified by his corroded eyes. The entity steals souls and claims to have killed Brodie’s mother and father in its search for the answer to the question that it claims Brodie’s father has solved and shared with her.
Carmen Amato’s writing style is engaging. The characters are wonderfully rich, and the reader is easily drawn into a relationship with them. The scenes are well described and literally painted by the words. This book feels like a love story kick-started by an untimely death that sparks a catharsis in the main character. It is a coming-of-age novel exploring the growth of Brodie from an unremarkable one-half of the campus power couple into a strong, independent, and self-assured woman that we can relate to and respect. The use of the paranormal specter as an antagonist was greatly appreciated, as was the fact that this was not a routine paranormal entity.
The dream sequences were explicitly detailed but odd recountings of scenes from known historical novels, just featuring Brodie in one role and the specter in another. Once the specter is identified and the answer to the question is known, this mystery is revealed and resolved in merely a few anticlimactic chapters. I hope to see more thoroughly woven storylines in future paranormal mysteries by Carmen Amato.
About Carmen Amato
Following a 30 year career with the Central Intelligence Agency, Carmen Amato writes mystery and suspense, including the Detective Emilia Cruz police series set in Acapulco. Emilia is the first female police detective in Acapulco, confronting Mexico’s cartels, corruption, and social inequalities. The series recently won the Poison Cup award for Outstanding Series from Crime Masters of America and was optioned for television.
Originally from upstate New York, Carmen’s experiences in Mexico and Central America launched her fiction career. Carmen is a recipient of both the National Intelligence Award and the Career Intelligence Medal.
Find out more at https://carmenamato.net
