Baby Jane [Paperback]

This book is an excellent reading experience and I would like to recommend it to any and all to purchase it.

All of Deemers' characters are both vibrant and real. Her attention to detail and character description makes them come alive and jump off the Kindle screen and into your dreams.

The plot of the book begins with Claire Dawson trying to pick up the remains of her shattered life and establish a new one in her new house that she plans to remodel. Fate has a way of intervening and as she begins to demolish the old walls she has no way of knowing that she is demolishing the walls that she has built up around her to protect her damaged psyche from its previous traumas and hold her heart in captive mysery.

As Claire tries to cope with the rapidly developing events that began to bombard her she finds herself drawn into a web of love and the conspiracy of NAZI evil that had crept into her quiet suburban locale and threatens to expose her innermost secrets and shame for the world to see.

With the help of an elderly neighbor she begins to investigate the circumstances that surround the death of an innocent baby. The deeper she digs the closer she unwittingly comes to being damned by an evil demon - the Jackal.

Her only other ally, Homicide Detective Dylan Lewis is put in an impossible situation between his duty as a police officer and his romantic attraction to the lovely and alluring Claire Dawson.

Little does he realize that the struggle for his heart's affection will not only duel it out in the temporal plane, but also in a netherworld filled with mystical beings and personas.

Reading this book had a natural flow and rhythm that made it one of those "hard to put down" stories that are so deliciously enjoyable to experience.

This was a very good story. I was very impatient to see what would happen. Even before I was half finished the book I was recommending it to people.

Michele Demers has crafted a thoroughly enjoyable breakout first novel in "Baby Jane". Although the book hits a lot of familiar genre touchstones, it does so in a way that twists expectations -- and which ultimately weaves a strong character story that frankly left me emotionally drained in the end. The setup of the novel promises a tight marriage of police procedural and supernatural thriller, but the book is so much more than that. Most interesting for me was Demers' decision to weave the supernatural story in with a compelling First Nations magic-realistic tapestry, and to make full use of a broad palette of characters as she unfolds a narrative exploring both the best and worst of human desires.

The mystery of "Baby Jane" is compelling enough in its own right. However, the book's biggest strength is the character story and the essential moral questions weaving through that character story -- How do we cope with a loss for which there is no forgiveness or forgetting? And how far would we go in the pursuit of vengeance for those unable to claim it for themselves?