Kirk Dougal

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: Legacy of Bones

Children found with the gift of magic are taken from their families and trained at the Sacara Institute. The Crimsons travel from town to town testing children. If a child even has the smallest inclination towards magic, they are bound and locked in cages to be transported to their new life. And if a family dares to intervene they are brutally beaten. When Keely, past the age of testing, shows a gift for healing magic, the family she resides with gives her up to the Crimsons. Meanwhile, her brother Gera journeys home after finishing his apprenticeship as a blacksmith, to discover his sister has been taken. Together, he and his brother Dax will hunt down the Crimsons that took their sister and discover there is much more at stake than the lives of one woman.

Legacy of Bones starts off a bit slow, taking time to build up the plot and characters. But readers will find the extra attention spent on the finer details is well spent. There are a lot of pieces at play, between backstories, politics, and hidden motivations. Together all of these elements create an entertaining story filled with sibling tension, haunted pasts, and startling revelations. This first novel lays down the foundation of a truly epic story for many books to come.

But even with the attention to detail, there were some parts of the story that didn’t quite line up. From the start, Dax is introduced as a troubled character. His backstory is built to showcase his guilt and the alcohol he uses to drown it out. He overcompensates when he is sober and makes some pretty poor decisions. He grows increasingly irate and angry as the story progresses. And up until his final defining moment I was on board for this character development. The combination of guilt and alcohol can make a person do horrible things, but his final appearances in the first novel left me confused and wondering what I may have missed. I also felt that there were a few groundbreaking moments mentioned in the later sections of the story that could have used a heavier build up even if it may have slowed the story a bit after the initial world-building.

However, Kirk Dougal created a story filled with political tension that kept pace with the main plot. Politics in a fantasy world can lead a story into lulls as armies mobilize and back door deals take away from the main focus of a story. Not in Legacy of Bones. In between the story of Gera, Dax, and Keely, there are chapters dedicated to building the antagonists of the story. Readers will witness the cruel nature of the Crimsons and the lengths they will go to achieve their ultimate goals. And while the readers may not fully realize what those goals are just yet, the situations the Crimsons create and partake in show the readers something evil is looming on the horizon.

There is so much at work in the background of this novel and so many different paths this story can take. Give this book a try if you enjoy the dark fantasy genre and novels that slowly reveal hidden histories and truths.… (més)

Review copy

"Richard Jefferson Dowland, Jr., 39. Divorced, no children. Goes by Rick but a whole generation of people know him as RJ. Graduated from UCLA with an undergrad in Computer Science at the age of twenty. Co-inventor of the first fully-immersed computer game, The Kindred. He personally registered twenty-nine patents related to computer- human interfaces and games."

Rick is now retired from the gaming industry and finds himself working homicide. When a serial killer starts killing immersive gamers his boss and the FBI ask him to go back in and become a deep sleeper again. Something he swore he'd never do. It's an addiction, a habit he managed to kick once and has no desire to revisit.

"Deep sleepers, the guys that stay inside for weeks or months, they pay someone to take care of their body while they are buried inside. Gamers call them peepers or peeps for short."

For a reader, Reset: The Dowland Cases - One provides instant gratification. The in-game action was fast paced and believable. The story itself was as immersive as a good video game. With Rick having to go into more than one game it gave the author a chance to experiment with various writing styles in the same novel, including crime noir in the game called The City.

Examples...

"The plug-in air freshener tried but there wasn’t enough potpourri in the world to cover up the smell rising from the body on the bed."

"I took a drink of the gin and wondered immediately if the bathtub had been clean when it was made."

"The canary on the mic had a color of blonde hair not found in nature and a dress slit almost high enough to see Cleveland. A few flat notes into thenext song and I understood why the dress needed to be so distracting."

"She stood close enough for me to hear the whisper of her blouse against skin as she breathed. Her perfume wafted into my nose and threatened to cloud my thinking."

So much fun, Of course, there are many red herrings along the way, but in the end, it all makes perfect sense and the set up is there for book two in the series. In the end Reset: The Dowland Cases - One is a tale that left me wanting more in the best possible way. Highly recommended.

Reset: The Dowland Cases - One is available for the Kindle. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited you can read it at no additional charge. Also, if you are an Amazon Prime member you can read it for FREE using the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

From the author's bio - Kirk Dougal has had fiction works appear in multiple anthologies and released his debut novel, DDreams of Ivory and Gold, in May of 2014. His YA dystopian novel, Jacked, was published in 2016. He's currently at work completing the sequel to Dreams, Valleys of the Earth.

Kirk is currently working in a corporate position with a group of newspapers after serving as a group publisher and editor-in-chief. He lives in Ohio with his wife and four children.… (més)

Review copy

In the Summer of 2013 I had the privilege of reading Manifesto UF edited by Tim Marquitz and Tyson Mauermann and I had this to say about "Rev" a short story by Kirk Dougal. "When in the hands of a writer who 'gets it,' urban fantasy can be a lot of fun and Dougal definitely 'gets it.'" It's nice to know Kirk Dougal still "gets it."

Dreams of Ivory and Gold is part fast-paced thriller, part urban fantasy, and part horror. The result is a genre bending, epic story of biblical proportions. A story more than 600 years in the making involving an emissary of the Catholic Church, given free reign to fight an ancient evil, and culminating in the investigation of a serial killer who leaves his victims a bloody mess and takes their uterus with him. It all makes sense when you know why.

The writer's characters are well rounded and fully realized making it easier to suspend your disbelief when dealing with the unbelievable. This is no small feat. Plus, I just realized this is Kirk Dougal's debut novel. Wow! That just makes this even more impressive.

Dreams of Ivory and Gold is available now in both paperback and for the Kindle through Amazon.com from Angelic Knight Press.

Yet another great read I can highly recommend.… (més)