Owl Manor:The Final Stroke (Book Three of Owl Manor Trilogy) by Zita Harrison

Zealous Art Publishing, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8846446267

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Amazon.com

Crazy, murderous, and long dead Rafe Bradstone, the owner of Owl Manor, is still a threat to women in the final book of Zita Harrison’s Owl Manor trilogy, Owl Manor: The Final Stroke. Unfortunately for Didi, Rachel, and Karen, the entrepreneurial new residents of the ill-fated mansion, there is a very thin line between the reality of their lives in 1901 and the supernatural manifestations of the sordid events of 1874. 

Imagining that they can turn Owl Manor into a dinner theater and art gallery, this creative trio immediately begin to notice strange changes in themselves and signs of trouble in their environment. Childlike Kitty, who aspires to be an actress, becomes increasingly sexually provocative, and sees apparitions of a woman from another time dressed in red. Rachel really wants to open her own restaurant, but finds herself obsessively researching the history of Owl Manor in order to understand why the manor is being haunted and how dead prostitutes figure into it. The artist, Didi, suffers from nightmares in which she becomes the victims of actual brutal murders and reenacts the deaths. After each dream, she is compelled to paint the atrocities in vivid detail. 

Early in the book, the three friends are forced to realize that they must find a way to deal directly with the evil that is drawing out hidden aspects of their character and activating the strange behavior of the men who frequent their business. All of the action in the book is centered around working out this mystery and exploring why it is that the women involved have been deprived of their basic rights as people. All the while, the ghastly owls continue their odd surveillance of the characters and remind us of Rafe Bradstone’s past and his wife Eva’s struggles to become independent in the first book, and the sad life of their daughter Abigail in the second.

Owl Manor: The Final Stroke has the most compelling plot and characters of this suspenseful Gothic trilogy. Harrison blends the supernatural and real horrors of violence against women with the very relatable challenges of women from any time period who are in search of personal, creative, and financial fulfillment. What makes this book stand apart is its subtlety in bringing out the horrific truth that evil, even when not fully manifested through gruesome actions, can still be present and growing, and that it can be overlooked, misinterpreted, and normalized until, suddenly, we see the monster that has been among us and maybe in us.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley