Weekly Reader: Winter's Origins: Winter Black Series The Prequel by Mary Stone; Brief But Confusing Tale Especially To Newcomers To The Winter Black Series

 Weekly Reader: Winter's Origins: Winter Black Series The Prequel by Mary Stone; Brief But Confusing Tale Especially To Newcomers To The Winter Black Series

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Normally, I don't mind reading a book that is part of a series. I am good at catching up and figuring what happened beforehand. But sometimes, there are books that are hard to follow if you don't know what happened before and since. Mary Stone's short novel, Winter's Origins is that kind of book

It's very well written and has a decent protagonist and genuine moments of suspense, but it clearly calls back and refers to characters and situations that the Reader should know about. It's not Stone's fault, really it's mine. I feel like I dropped in the middle of an A-B conversation, and everyone is looking at me and telling me to C my way out.

What saves this short novel is its lead character. Winter Black is a great protagonist. She is traumatized by the deaths of her family and is determined to become an FBI agent to find closure in their deaths as well as to spare other families from going through the same experiences that she went through.

As true in many of these types of stories, Winter has supernatural abilities to help her on her journey (don't they all?). She is psychic and has images usually before and after a violent crime happens. These visions help provide clues to catching the criminals and prove to help make some pages pretty dark in this story. Unfortunately, her abilities don't always work as shown with her family's death. This fills her with guilt as she pushes herself to succeed in her chosen career path.

There are some really great moments that demonstrate the difficulties of being a woman in the FBI. Winter is constantly questioned by her colleagues and shifted around to various departments. She is purposely made uncomfortable by male colleagues and suspects. 

There are also genuine moments of real suspense throughout, such as when Winter's visions allow them to pursue a particularly nasty character and she has a tense chase pursuing him. The tension is brief but written in a way that captures suspense in the short text. It is a short novel where the action is perfectly spaced within the characterization.

What makes this short novel confusing is the amount of pre-knowledge that the Reader should have before going in. There are moments of exposition that are done in a way to throw names and situations that no doubt the average Reader of The Winter Black Series will get. For example when one character asks another if they are trying to atone for not catching "The Preacher" without any explanation, this Reader thinks "Yes, yes very sad, tragic. Who the heck is The Preacher?"

Since this is supposed to be a prequel, even called Winter's Origins, there shouldn't be that many references. This book should serve as a way to tell Readers what happened before, not confuse them further.

The truth is there is enough that with some editing, Winter's Origins could be a stand alone book and would certainly be better that way. But trying to connect to the other books only creates a blizzard of confusion instead of a nice flurry of excitement.