I literally said, “Oh yeah!” out loud when I got to the first chapter of this book, which came after a very brief prologue. It read Alistair at the top of the page, so I was excited about coming up with the correct prediction regarding the main character, and equally elated that there was going to be an entire book about him. I first got the feeling when Jonas mentions watching his brother watching a blue haired girl at the art gala near the end of Oaths and Omissions. I think I knew then that the mayor’s story would be up and coming.
Arrows and Apologies takes place at about the same time as Oaths and Omissions, you will see the overlap where this story begins and the art gala from the previous book. So while Jonas is in the middle of his arrangement with Lenny, Alistair is trying to figure out why he is so enamored with this stranger he met once in Boston. Cora, our main lady, is on a mission to find a missing person and her search leads her to Aplana Island. She had no idea that the man she encountered one time in an alley on the mainland was the mayor of the island town she was led towards in her search. Now she finds herself face to face with the possessive, slightly irritating, and dangerous man everyday while she vigilantly pursues any and all leads to finding the person she has been looking for over the past year.
There is a lot more mystery involved in this story than the others, the reader is not privy to all, or most, of the information. You are actually trying to find out what happened to the missing person as we do not get a first person point of view from them. There is one shifty character, which is normal for this series, and the entire time you are trying to figure out what his angle is and where his loyalties truly lie. Also, he’s kind of a huge jerk, I disliked him every time he appeared on the page. We get introduced to what I believe is the big, majority ruling crime family that is a backbone behind all the crime in the entire series. The amount of power they hold makes the power that we have seen from Kallum, Jonas, and now Alistair, less so in comparison. Alistair doesn’t quite seem scared of them, just worried. But for a man like him, a man who seems to rarely be bothered by anything, this is a cause for concern. I wonder if we will get a deeper view into the organization in the remaining two books.
The next book, number five, I accidentally got a preview of as I was finishing up this one. An excerpt from the next book followed the epilogue of this one, and it was on the same page and my eyes strayed. I usually enjoy the surprise of discovering who our next characters will be when I open up the next book, but when I saw who it was I exclaimed, “Ooooo” a little loudly. I won’t say who I saw, but I did see them coming. And I do intend that ‘them’ to be read as plural.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 