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

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

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

Book Review: Owl Manor: Abigail (Book Two of the Owl Manor Trilogy) by Zita Harrison

A note from the editor:

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Owl Manor: Abigail (Book Two of the Owl Manor Trilogy), by Zita Harrison

Zealous Art Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 979-8675396467

Available: Kindle, Paperback

“And I knew this thing was built of all my fears, was empowered by them, and that it would devour me if it could,” says Abigail, the central character in the second book of Zita Harrison’s Owl Manor Trilogy. Inspired by Gothic suspense classics, this fast-paced psychological thriller about a jilted young woman alone in the world after her mother’s murder, is chock full of malevolent supernatural forces. An eerily evocative Colorado mountain setting, an estate-turned-inn where hovering owls have been known to attack, and a series of unexplained murders, are only the beginning. Readers can find out about Abigail’s childhood in the first book of the trilogy, Owl Manor: The Dawning, which takes place during the Gold Rush, but this second volume deftly takes us into Abigail’s present without disruptive recaps.

Unfortunately for Abigail, her mother Eva’s murderer/dead lover, the insane Rafe Bradstone, has possessed his relative Victor and hopes to be reunited with Eva’s spirit through her daughter. Abigail has already been traumatized by knowing that her mother did not want her, by being at the manor when her mother and Rafe died, and by being left by her fiancé on the day of her wedding. Although the staff at Owl Manor care about her, they are finding it difficult to deal with the ghosts and strange houseguests, and are left to handle the violence without the help of the authorities. Abigail had hoped to prove to herself that she could survive on her own, but the past, for which she was not responsible, comes back to haunt her anyway.

An interesting element woven loosely through the two books Harrison has written so far (the third will be Owl Manor: Nightfall) is the attention to the role of women as wives and mothers, attitudes toward unmarried women (including prostitutes), and the life choices women had in the United States during the 1800’s. Eva is portrayed as a sort of feminist who is determined to leave her restrictive family life and make her own money. Eva pays dearly for her choices, and her daughter is her innocent victim. Abigail wonders, “Is the world, in the end, just a reflection of one’s state of mind?” She does get an answer in this creepy, entertaining book. Recommended.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley