Occultober Day 6 A Heart in the Right Place by Heide Goody and Iain Grant
Occultober Day 6 A Heart in the Right Place by Heide Goody and Iain Grant
Ah, the werewolf—one of the trinity of creatures that dominate the modern urban fantasy. That’s why they appear in so many of this year’s Occultober stories, but few authors handle them as well as Heide Goody and Ian Grant do in A Heart in the Right Place.
The story purports to be about a young man and his dying father taking a father-son trip into the Scottish Highlands to try and rehabilitate their relationship before dad dies. You quickly get the impression that neither of them really want to do this and that they have only agreed to the trip to make the mother/wife happy. This turns into an absolutely great part of the story after a fairly slow start, but it’s not, in my opinion, the heart of the tale.
That would be Finn. Finn is a totally psycho assassin who in addition to being a sociopath is also a control freak. She is fascinating from moment one to moment last. Her need to control everything never lets her quit and she is really just a delight every time she appears on a page. I feel a little bit bad liking the “bad gal” more than anyone else (and I want to be clear, I really like Nick and his dad by the end of the book), but she is just a delightfully evil creation—not someone you would ever want to meet or even hope exists in the world, but a wonderful villain to fuel the story.
Finn has been given the not-as-simple-as-it-looks task of procuring a heart from a still living man named Oz. Nick, trying to set up his perfect weekend with his dad, has the misfortune of having the bottle of 30-year-old Scotch he purchased for the occasion misdelivered to Oz’s house by the postal service. This small misfortune will lead to some very bad decisions on Nick’s part coupled with incredibly bad luck as Finn mistakenly believes that Nick is Oz and chases him and his father into the Scottish Highlands. None of that is a spoiler, it’s just the basic scene setting for the plot.
Complicating Finn’s life is that she’s been given a minder for this “hit” and she doesn’t play well with others. The minder is a corporate type who is big on planning and is keeping one important surprise away from Finn for much of the tale. They don’t get along well, but it helps to flush out Finn’s character quite a bit.
Finally, there is the werewolf who makes an appearance early enough to inject some seriously high octane into the rest of the story. Everything goes crazy once the werewolf makes an appearance and while I correctly predicted some of the consequences, I didn’t predict all of them. I love the take that Goody and Grant have on werewolves and would love to see them do more on this theme. In fact, I’m going to have to look over their other series to discover if they are as delightful as this book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...
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