This paranormal mystery, with multi-dimensional travel and telepathic animals, concludes a trilogy about three women with parallel lives all split from one traumatized child.
In the first title, Elizabeth Ann Anderson unknowingly creates Liz, Beth, and Ann, three separate identities born to the same parents and living in the same Redcliff Beach, Washington house, although all in different dimensions. The women cross into one another’s dimensions through a magic touchstone and meet regularly as friends.
In this story, Beth and Ann are each shot during separate visits to another dimension by a teenaged boy named Neil, the son of the late Elizabeth Ann Gardner (Bette), yet another parallel life of Elizabeth Ann. Neil, who lives alone with his telepathic dog, panics when he sees these women who look exactly like his dead mother, and is uncertain about his future.
Liz and her own telepathic dog help nurse the injured women while trying to understand what the visits to Neil’s dimension could possibly mean. Throughout, a psychotic veterinarian attempts to murder one of the women, malicious Cousin Lydia returns to Redcliff Beach, and a new neighbor becomes a lover to one of the Elizabeth Anns. Luckily for Liz, Beth, and Ann, their animal familiars guide them to their designated futures.
Despite its many plot elements, this novel reads more like an amplified short story than a full-length novel. Much of the story seems like padding to create enough pages to get to the desired conclusion; the subplots add little, if anything to the thin central story. Long conversations using unnatural dialogue filled with grammatical, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographical errors slow down the flow: “‘Lydia Parsons? Good lord, Dana, its [sic] Lester and Hana’s oldest. You remember…the bitch.’”
While followers of the series, already accustomed to these writing flaws, will likely find the final resolution for each woman satisfying, this book requires professional editing to meet traditional publishing standards.
Also available in paperback.
