Child's Play: "The Three" by Sarah Lotz

On a day that came to be known as "Black Thursday" four planes crash at different locations around the world.  Over a thousand lives are lost and yet, miraculously, there are three survivors. Three children, one from Japan, one from the UK and one from the USA... and briefly, long enough to leave a recorded message on her cell phone, Pamela May Donald, a middle-aged house wife from South Texas. What can it mean?
Author Elspeth Martins gets it all out there in her gripping book Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy (Inside the phenomenon of The Three)!
She gathers together interviews with relatives of survivors, the e-mail exchanges of two Japanese teens, and much, much more. You won't be able to put Ms. Martin's book down, nor the book by the real author of all this creepy fun, Sarah Lotz!
In a brilliant use of a book within a book you can almost believe in the media circus that surrounds the survivors and their families as they try to make sense of the phenomenon and the religious cult that builds around the woman from Texas and her final words sent via that cell phone. Ms. Lotz writes with such a riveting visual intensity you can imagine it all unfolding as you read. Highly recommended! Stay tuned for a review of a companion book: Day Four!

Out of the Blue and into the Black: "Redemption of Shadows" by Cathy M. Conway

It is always fun to discover a new Phantom author and see what journey they have in store for our favorite characters. I recently downloaded "Redemption of Shadows" by Cathy M. Conway and started glancing at it to get an idea of what she was doing... and next thing, I was half way into it! This is a very addictive story!
The story begins with Erik recovering from a drug induced sleep, a ploy for Christine to come back and be with him at his death bed. The Persian left them alone, so, who knows what happened between them? Two days later, Amir is finally getting Erik to return to life. A life without his beloved Christine. Was it really worth it? It would have been easy to just slip into the great beyond.
But, no. Fate has other things in store for him. He returns from an outside excursion to find someone has entered his passage ways. Determined to find the intruder and possibly put an end to their snooping with his ever ready punjab lasso... he finds, instead, a limp bundle that turns out to be an unconscious, bloodied and beaten young woman. He is taken aback. Erik rescues her and nurses this mystery woman in his lair and as she slowly comes round, between doses of morphine, she claims not to know her name or who she is. What she is, to Erik, is a stunning beauty who has been terribly mistreated. How and why, he might never learn. But one thing was for certain, she was keeping him interested and giving him a new reason to live...
If you love Phantom fiction and are looking for an intriguing new take on the classic, then be sure to find your way to a copy of Ms. Conway's "Redemption of Shadows"! You will be very glad you did!