The Gift – Eleanor’s Story – RA Williams

The North Atlantic, 14 April 1912. Amid the chaos of the sinking Titanic, a young Eleanor Annenberg meets the eyes of a stranger and is immediately captivated. As the ship buckles around them, she follows him down into the hold and finds him leaning over an open sarcophagus, surrounded by mutilated bodies. She catches but a glimpse of what lies within before she’s sucked into a maelstrom of freezing brine and half-devoured corpses. Elle is pulled out of the water, but the stranger – and the secrets she stumbled upon – are lost. Unintentionally, however, he leaves her a gift; one so compelling that Elle embarks on a journey that pulls her into a world of ancient evils, vicious hunters and human prey to find the man who saved her that fateful night. From trench warfare at Cape Helles in 1915 to a shipwreck in the tropical shallows off the Honduran coast, from a lost mine beneath the towering Externsteine in a Germany on the verge of war to the gothic crypts of Highgate Cemetery in London, Elle gets closer to a truth she has sought for most of her life. But at what cost? Gifts, after all, are seldom free.

I received a reveiew copy from the publishers. I would also like to thank Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to host this leg of the blog tour for The Gift.

 

If The Gift was a movie (oh what a movie it would make) then it would absolutely be crying out for some between scene interludes where a series of dots track the progress of the story location across a map of the world. It begins on board the Titanic but events will see us in the trenches of Gallipoli during WW1, to lecture halls in the USA and then out in the ocean around the carribean. It’s a story which crosses continents and wherever the adventures take us there is always the threat of an unknown evil lurking in the background.

Onboard the Titanic during her maiden fateful voyage we meet Elle, a feisty 17 year old who is travelling with her parents. She is fending off unwelcome attentions of bankers and businessmen when the ship strikes the iceberg. But below decks one of the crew has discovered a horror in one of the holds, before alarm can be raised he is captivated by the sight of something watching him from the darkness, he will never see the light again.

As the alarm on the ship is raised Elle is below decks – she hears the shouts of alarm but not of the disaster which looms for Titanic, for a much more pressing danger below decks. There are names shouted, warnings, shotguns are discharged and one name – Balthazar stands out in the chaos.

It’s a dark, eerie and exciting opening to this story and the sinister, gothic danger continues. RA Williams has done a terrific job of teasing chills and keeping the reader’s attention. Action quickly switches from Titanic lifeboats to trench warfare at Gallipoli. This time we see a promoted soldier in no mans land, crawling through carnage to bring his own terror to the enemy as he hunts down snipers and enemy soldiers ensuring his own platoon stay safe. It is while he hunts among the bodies of the fallen that a “devil” is spotted – a creature which could not be explained but one that someone else may have seen.

The scenes in the trenches were particularly engaging. I loved this part of the story and the thinly veiled contempt which is shown to the officers who secure themselves safely away from the action is terrifically scripted.

Through the story is a constant threat of an undead evil. Mayan gods are mentioned, bats, ressurection and powerful sentinels. There is so much detail given about these mysterious forces that you will become captivated by the story which unfolds.

Elle grows into Eleanor and she is a successful academic. People travel many hundreds of miles to hear her speak about mysterious carvings, messages from history which crop up in new places around the world seemingly suggesting an old tale has spanned the globe when travel was extremely limited. The common theme – A Gift. While a gift would seem to be a positive story in these tales it really does not have a good association, fear and death seem more common companions.

The Gift comes as a fast flowing adventure tale with lashings of detail of evil forces. I loved it.

 

The Gift is published by Whitefox Publishing and is available in hardback. You can order a copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-gift-book-1-eleanor/ra-williams/9781913532956