Review: A COURTROOM OF ASHES by C.S. Wilde

Santana Jones never thought she’d fall in love with a dead guy, but that was before she met John Braver, the incredibly charming and incredibly dead politician on the other side of her mirror. 

When an evil spirit drags Santana’s soul across the mirror and into Purgatory, she’ll need all the help she can get to return to her body. With John by her side, nothing can go wrong. But Purgatory is a dangerous place for a lawyer with a pitch-black past. Santana has always wondered if she’d go to Hell for defending rapists and murderers. 

Reviewed by: Magda

Rating: 3.5 stars 

Review:  You’re staring at your own reflection and you realize that your image is smiling…but you’re not. A mirror with a mind of its own? Or perhaps a trickery of an over-worked mind? Or a warning from beyond the grave?

For sensible and intelligent Santana, this could only be a dream or a lucid imagination. Until she realizes that the haunted mirror is a portal that connects to Death, a purgatory that is neither bad nor good. Just Death. Freaky!

But it seems that a dear friend of hers is trapped somewhere in Death, and Santana will stop at nothing to find her. Santana soon finds herself caught in a cryptic maze of darkness and horror. She finds herself trapped in Death.

Could this dark prison be her penance for her ruthless ways as a conniving and deceitful lawyer, freeing criminals into an unsuspecting society?

Yet, as her soul traverses the land of Death, she comes to realize that the spirits lead perfectly normal lives, more or less. “The Home is a sanctuary where people can go through the afterlife together.” (102) Of course, some of the details might sound trivial and they can be quite perplexing, especially when the story is taking place in the worlds of both the living and the dead and Santana simultaneously exists in both worlds. That can be a little confusing. However, they don’t steal from the core plot of the story: locating a spirit and returning Santana’s soul to her body before it’s too late. Before the devil takes over her body and begins the apocalypse. Chilling! But the more pressing question was: What happens when you die in Death?

Story is a wonderful and well-written tale of mystery and psychedelic intrigue.