Blackwood

Blackwood

by Gwenda Bond

Roanoke Island is the stuff of legends... literally.  The first settled town of the new Americas, when those who left to get provisions came back three years later, all the people had disappeared.  There was no trace of them anywhere.  No bodies.  No note.  Just the word "Croatoan" on a post and all the homes were dismantled. 

It's an enduring mystery that many are still trying to solve today.

Miranda Blackwood has lived on Roanoke since birth; she's never even stepped across the bridge to go to the mainland.  All her life, she's lived with the stares and talk of the townspeople around her.  She's the curse-bearer.  She and her father bear the name of the betrayer.  In the eyes of the island natives, the Blackwoods will never amount to any good.

Phillips Rawling, son of the police chief, has his own issues.  He hears the voices of the dead. They fill his mind and prevent him from thinking straight.  After having been sent off the island, and subsequently away from the voices, years before, Phillips is back and he's just in time.

Because it's happened again.

Over a hundred islanders have disappeared without a trace.  Somehow, Miranda is involved.  And Phillips may be the only person who can help her set things right.

Final thoughts: I will start off by saying that a large part of the problem I had with reading this book was the formatting of the NetGalley ARC I got on my Kindle.  There are serious spacing issues, which cause confusion when points of view change but there's no identifier like a paragraph space to show that a change in narrator is occurring.  However, the writing overall is fairly poor.  There's just not enough detail of the major events.  There are sudden shifts in location without explanation.  One moment she's one place and the next, she's somewhere else.  Some things are stressed as fairly important and then ignored later, while other things barely mentioned suddenly become essential.  The story is interesting (though the author admits to taking tons of liberties with the history, the actual location, and other facts), but the follow-thru is lacking.

Rating: 1/5