Book Review: Chapelwood (The Borden Dispactches) by Cherie Priest

Chapelwood by Cherie Priest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first three star of the year...

So let's get started with this book review, shall we? Chapelwood was an alright book-had the same feel as the first book, but it was totally different, since it was set in Brimingham, Alabama. It felt like a southern gothic story, and it didn't pick up till the end, where Lizzie finally grabbed an axe and killed all those people...but then she disappeared. Like she left and I have no idea where the heck she went at the end. But I felt like the ending the flat, and that we don't get a really good description of the so called "God" that was in the basement when Inpector Wolf found it.

But we are introduced to Ruth Stephensen, a girl who is terrified of her father and the Chapelwood Church. She has these little "spells" that takes over her, and she talks to the spirits. Her father beat her and her mother, and she decided to leave one day when her family went to Chapelwood. Something about Chapelwood scared her, because she left her house to go to Father James Coyle for help. Father Coyle listened to her and gave her a solution: marry Pedro Gussman, a latinx man who was a handyman. She does, and her father finds out about it. So what does a father do when he learns that his daughter eloped with a strange man that he doesn't know?

He unalives the Father.

After that, that's when Inspector Wolf comes down to Brimingham, which is rich with prejudices and the so called 'True Americans' and the KKK, to pay his respects and to also see through Ruth and the trial of her father, in which he knew that he would walk free. So he asks Lizzie Borden to come down and help him, only to find out that the same evil that was in Maplewood before was down here in Birmingham. Then everything spirals to the end, where something happened to Lizzie, we don't know what, an earthquake happened when Wolf threw the reverend into the hole where the so called "God" was, and Ruth became a medium and is working under Wolf.

It was an alright book up to the end, wish it ended better, but then, Lizzie was older than she was in Maplecroft, and things just fell flat for me when I thought it was going to get better. But I did like murder parts in the beginning, with Leonard Kincaid started going mad seeing the numbers. But other than that, that was it. No appearance of Nance, no nothing. Fell a bit flat for me, but hey, I still enjoyed it, though.

View all my reviews