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Review: Threads of Malice

Posted by Mark | Filed under Books, Reviews

Threads of Mal­ice
My rat­ing: 4 out of 5.

I read Threads of Mal­ice last week¹ and wowsers! If you’ve read Ghosts in the Snow then you need to be warned before read­ing Threads that Ghosts is a much lighter book than Threads. The vil­lian in Threads is far more evil than the one in Ghosts and this gives the book a much darker tone. Still with that being said, Threads is a great read.

This time around Mrs. Jones takes us out of the cas­tle and up into The Reach. Young boys have been dis­ap­pear­ing through­out the region for the past cou­ple of years. When Dubric arrives in the area; he’s greeted by dozens of ghosts all at once. It’s quite the unex­pected & drain­ing expe­ri­ence for him. Addi­tion­ally, we get to see Dien’s fam­ily and Lars learns what real fam­ily life is like.

I don’t really know what else about the story I could tell you with­out giv­ing away either the mys­tery or the good non-mystery bits. This is a prob­lem that I’m not the only one has. I say this because at ICON this past week­end, I attended a panel where Mrs. Jones read some pas­sages from Threads; as well as a few pages from her third Dubric book². One of the pas­sages she read from Threads was included one of my favorite scenes in the book, though it turns out we visu­al­ized it some­what dif­fer­ently. The scene takes place as Lars along with 2 of Dien’s daugth­ers are walk­ing into town to buy some sup­plies³.

He hur­ried after them, their names hov­er­ing in his throat, but he halted after a few steps. Aly climbed onto the head of a mas­sive stone rab­bit, then slid down its back, laugh­ing all the while. Jess leaned against it, her hand on its nose, regard­ing him with mirth­ful eyes.
“Lars, Har­grove, I’d like to intro­duce you to your geandfather’s rab­bit.” She bowed with a flour­ish and grinned at him.

That’s just a frag­ment of the scene, but it’s the impor­tant part to me. When I first read this scene, my mind drew up a pic­ture of a rab­bit sit­ting up on its hindlegs wear­ing a waist­coat (like some­thing you’d expect from Alice in Won­der­land). The rab­bit was made of a “mostly” white mar­ble, with bits of grey scat­tered about here & there. The weather had caused a small crack to form near the top of the rabbit’s head, just above the left eye. Some moss had begun to grow in that crack, look­ing some­thing like a scar and giv­ing the rab­bit a cer­tain rogu­ish appeal. From speak­ing to Mrs. Jones at ICON, I found out she had imag­ined the stone rab­bit look­ing like a rab­bit you’d see in nature. Ok, so maybe it’s not all that impor­tant but I found the scene very endearing.

I’m feel­ing a bit out of it; so I’m going to wrap this review up. The book was excel­lent but didn’t quite grip me like Ghosts had. On the other hand, the intense evil and dark­ness in this book was some­what bal­anced out with Lars get­ting his first real taste of what fam­ily life is like. It’s a highly enjoy­able read and I wouldn’t hes­i­tate to rec­om­mend it to any adult read­ers⁴. Mrs Jones, good job and I look for­ward to the next book!

¹ Since then I’ve read through Equal Rites, Wyrd Sis­ters and Witches Abroad. I just didn’t feel like writ­ing up reviews for those books.
² Cur­rently, the third book is titled “Val­ley of the Soul”.
³ Taken from pages 144–145 of Threads of Mal­ice.
⁴ Given the forms that the evil takes in this book; I would not rec­om­mend this for younger readers.

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