The Skeleton Key by Tara Moss

The Skeleton Key by Tara Moss is the third Pandora English novel. I have previously read and reviewed (and enjoyed!) the first two books, The Blood Countess and The Spider Goddess. This review has only very minor spoilers for the earlier books.

In the third Pandora English mystery, Pandora is still negotiating her double life as a lowly assistant at a New York fashion magazine with the reality that she has great supernatural powers and responsibilities.

With the full moon set to rise once again, Pandora has a very special date looming. Her beautiful spirit guide, Civil War soldier Lieutenant Luke, will be a flesh-and-blood man, if only for the night, and she hasn't been able to stop thinking about it. But a chance encounter with playboy Jay Rockwell sees that very human attraction start all over again – even though Jay doesn't remember their previous relationship, or the fact that Pandora saved him from a gang of ill-tempered undead supermodels.

Meanwhile, Pandora – with her special skeleton key – is slowly unlocking the mysteries of the haunted mansion where she lives with her great aunt Celia. What sinister experiments did the architect Dr Edmund Barrett conduct there before he died? Where is his laboratory? And what are the strange noises emanating from the basement?

On the centenary of the mysterious fire that supposedly killed Dr Barrett, he returns to the mansion. He has a message for Pandora. But he has brought with him a dark force that threatens to tear apart the delicate balance between the worlds of the dead and living...

It's been more than a year since I read the first two books, so I may be misremembering, but I think The Skeleton Key is a little darker than its predecessors. The gist of it is much the same — Pandora dealing with New York, her fashion job, and weird supernatural things — but I thought the evil supernatural threat was a bit darker and more serious this time around. Saving the world on a larger scale, but still not too heavy a read.

Although the blurb implies a love triangle, I wouldn't say it's the kind of contrived and increasingly irritating love triangle we've come to expect from YA. (Also, this isn't YA. I'd call it "new adult" although I think the first ones were published before that was much of a thing and also my opinion of "new adult" isn't terribly high.) The crux of Pandora's love life, really, is that one guy is a ghost, and the other has no memory of their first date. Really it's more logistical, in both cases, rather than a case of "oh golly, which should I choose?" So I liked that.

Being the third in the series (although not the final, as far as I can tell/hope) is, I think, the reason the climax is rather more dramatic than the earlier books. Pandora's abilities and the trouble she gets into and has to get out of (trouble which, I should emphasise, is never her fault) has been building book by books. I think it was in book two that we learnt that Pandora is a Chosen One and it's brought up a lot in The Skeleton Key and is part of the reason (sort of) for things escalating. But I get the feeling they can escalate more, so I look forward to the next book, whenever that's written (I couldn't easily find any info on Moss's website).

I highly recommend this series to fans of not-too-heavy urban fantasy. Although I've said The Skeleton Key is darker than its predecessors, it's still on the lighter side of the urban fantasy genre, in my opinion. It builds on the earlier books more than The Spider Goddess did, so I don't recommend reading it before the others. But all in all, an enjoyable read, particularly in a week when I needed something relaxing to take my mind off business.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2012, Pan Macmillan (AU)
Series: Pandora English, book 3 of ? (three so far)
Format read: eBook
Source: Purchased from iBooks
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge

The Spider Goddess by Tara Moss

The Spider Goddess is the second book in Tara Moss’s Pandora English series. I started reading it immediately after finishing the first book, The Blood Countess (gosh aren’t those iBooks links at the back of the book to the next in the series handy?), which I have reviewed here.

The Spider Goddess is a fun, quick read in a very similar vein to The Blood Countess. Pandora English is a supernaturally gifted assistant at a New York magazine who is only starting to discover and develop her powers. She lives with her preternaturally youthful great aunt in a supernaturally resonant (or something like that) mansion apartment in a mysteriously enshrouded suburb of Manhattan.

Once again, we meet Luke, her hansom civil-war soldier ghost friend and watch her run-ins with some of the evil (but cheerful) vampire supermodels from the first book.

The main way in which this book differs from the first are: the different villain (a spider goddess, as the cover suggests), and the overarching plot progression. The background plot moves slowly, which suggests to me that Moss plans on writing many more Pandora English books before she’s done. I have absolutely no objection to this and look forward to reading them all.

The foreground plot, however, moves quickly from strange happenings in the background to creepy (-crawly) discoveries and then the climax. If anything, I felt the book was too short. I had stopped paying attention to the page numbers down the bottom when I reached the climax and thought I had more to go. It made me wonder why the bad guy villain was dying already, until I realised I was actually close to the end. So, really, the worst criticism I have is that I didn’t want it to end.

A nice thing about this series is that it is heavily populated with a broad range of mostly strong female characters. From the main character, to her great-aunt/mentor to the villains and her bosses at work. It’s nice to see. (Half or so of the male characters are love interests, I think.)

Overall, it was just as fun as the first book, although I think I enjoyed the first book slightly more for non-specific reasons of taste. Also, if you’re uncomfortable reading about hordes of spiders, this may not be the book for you.

Finally, although part of a series, I think this book stands alone fairly well. However, it does contain a few spoilers for the first book. Reading in order would maximise enjoyment of the earlier book, but reading out of order wouldn’t compromise enjoyment of this book, in my opinion.

4 / 5 stars

The Blood Countess by Tara Moss

Cross posted from here.



I decided to grab this book for a few reasons. In no particular order: Tara Moss is awesome (decided based mainly on her blog), I don’t mind the occasional vampire/urban fantasy/paranormal book, it was on sale (on iTunes/iBooks), and I could use it towards the Australian Women Writers Challenge (not that I’m desperately short of books for that, but excuses make the book-buying world go ‘round). Some of the reviews on iTunes and LibraryThing lead me to not expect very much of this book. Even if they hadn’t the blurb was not misleading, so I wasn’t disappointed.

You know what? I really enjoyed The Blood Countess by Tara Moss. It wasn’t super-deep (it’s about fashion and magazines in New York), and it wasn’t brooding and angst-ridden. It was fun, entertaining and amusing.

The main character, Pandora, comes to New York from some tiny hicksville town, to stay with her great aunt. She was desperate to get away from said small town partly because of the hicks and partly because it’s her dream to be a writer and work at a New York magazine. Back home, where she lived with her aunt since her parents died in her teens, she spent her time living in books because there wasn’t much else to do and because she didn’t have any friends. She was the town weird kid thanks to her ability to see and speak to ghosts (strongly discouraged by her parents when they were still alive).

She arrives in New York to be greeted by her great aunt’s mysteriously mute chauffeur, who then takes her to her great aunt’s home in a tiny suburb of Manhattan that doesn’t appear on any maps. Also, her great aunt’s building is haunted. Also, vampires, many of which are jolly (seriously, it makes a nice change from the brooding kind).

The story follows Pandora’s attempts to find a job and to start building a career in New York. Suspicious things are happening in the fashion world, mostly centred around a revolutionary new face cream, sinister models and, well, general supernatural shadiness.

To be honest, it’s not the plot that makes this book. Really, the villain of the piece is named in the title, so I don’t think it was supposed to be a surprise. What makes this book book stand out is the voice of the protagonist. In her childhood, her parents and shrink convinced her there was no such thing as ghosts and effectively trained her into keeping quiet and ignoring her “vivid dreams”. That said, once strange things start happening and she starts searching for and getting some answers, she doesn’t spend very long running around in a haze of denial like in some books I won’t mention (and she was quite quick to accept the ghosts back into her life).

More importantly, her inner monologue and her interactions with her great aunt are funny and quirky and really made the book for me. It cheered me up during a stressful week. The digs at pop culture, of varying degrees of unsubtlety also helped.

A small thing that I liked was the way Moss described Pandora’s clothes and didn’t superfluously describe every item of clothing every model who walked past was wearing. As someone not very au fait with the fashion world (shocking revelation, I know), it was nice to have clothing described in a straight forward way with a minimum of slang. I’ve read too many books which expected me to know more clothes/fashion terms than I do, including books not actually about fashion. It was an appreciated touch.

I definitely recommend this book for some light, pleasant reading. So long as you’re not expecting a deep exploration of supernatural lore and human psychology, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

Rating: 4.5 / 5 stars