Lisa Unger Novellas

This is a novella, the first of three in what is to be the HOLLOWS series. The "whispers" are the voices of the dead, "low and musical, eternal...telling their stories to the sky." Eloise Montgomery starts hearing the sounds and experiencing visions after recovering from a tragic accident that killed her husband and oldest daughter. The visions, which she tries to ignore at first, are of girls in danger. Eloise, still in the throes of horrible grief as she attempts to console her younger daughter who also survived, is initially not willing to act on what she perceives. She denies her inner psychic, but eventually the things she sees lead her to help those girls. Short and somewhat overwrought, this introduction sets the stage for what apparently will be two other novellas featuring Eloise. It was entertaining and a quick read and I intend to go read the second one, THE BURNING GIRL, immediately.

This sequel, the second in a planned trilogy of novellas originally titled the HOLLOWS, was a tremendous disappointment. I read it immediately after finishing THE WHISPERS and thought the story would continue as the reader learned more about Eloise Montgomery and her "gift" of psychic visions of girls in distress. This short piece, however, starts TEN YEARS later. Eloise is established as a working psychic, teamed up with now private investigator Ray Muldane (he was a cop in the first novella) and they work together to solve cases when possible. I use the word cases though most of the narrative involves only Eloise's feelings about having her visions and how hard it is for her, draining her dry and making her look old and haggard. We're introduced to an interesting character, THE BURNING GIRL, but that plot thread goes nowhere by the end. It was all very unsatisfying and now I doubt I even want to bother with the third in the series to see if there's any resolution and to find out who that girl is and what happened. Thank you to NetGalley for both of these e-book ARCs to review