'When a grieving mother turns to an ancient Buddhist ritual for solace and mistakenly awakens a vengeful spirit, dark karma threatens to destroy everything she holds dear….
'Struggling with depression after the death of her young daughter, Jennifer flees to a healing center in the Sri Lankan jungle. Encouraged to visit the local temple, she finds unexpected meaning in the beliefs of Buddhism. But it’s not long before she becomes entangled in the mystic—and dangerous—world of village folklore, and the slippery, transferable energy of karma.
'Still, the jungle works its magic, and Jennifer begins to recover. Returning to Santa Monica, she rebuilds her life through painting, even opening her heart to a new love. But when her deceased daughter appears begging for help, and mounting bodies baffle the police, she battles to repair the shift in karma and free her daughter’s soul.'
A Twist of Karma is one of those rare books that I really enjoy, where it makes you think that it's going to be one thing, but keeps changing gear and twisting genre until you're not sure what to expect anymore, yet don't care because you're just really enjoying the journey and don't want it to end.
The plot follows Jennifer, a single woman who recently lost her eight year old daughter to a tragic accident where she drowned in their back yard pool. As you can expect, Jennifer is something of a wreck when the book starts. She blames herself for what happened, and is deep into depression. She's sees the loss of her daughter as her whole world falling apart, and you can't really blame her for that. However, when the book starts she's set out to try and do something about this, having travelled to a healing and meditative retreat in Sri Lanka for a few months.
Over the first big chunk of the book we watch Jennifer as she tries to come to terms with her loss, and how finding the Buddhist faith comes to help her with this. We see her becoming more physically healthy, and more importantly, we see how the tenets of Buddhism help her emotionally. Her journey is so engaging that you begin to forget what the blurb of the book said, about the ghost of her daughter and police investigations, and just settle into this more personal and down to earth journey.
If this was all the book was going to be about it would have still been a great read, as there were parts of this section that really drew me in and made me invested in Jennifer and some of the other characters, to the point where I came really close to tears at one point. I didn't even realise how much the book was effecting me until it hit me hard with something upsetting.
However, the book is about so much more than this, so the last two thirds of the book changes things up as Jennifer returns to her home in Los Angeles, and we get to see her settling back into her old life, and bringing the teachings from Sri Lanka with her. Much like the first part of the book we spend a lot of time just seeing Jennifer interacting with the world around her, reconnecting with friends and family, going on dates, and returning to her art career. It's not until the first body turns up that things begin to take a twist.
When the murder plot came into the book I'd almost completely forgot to expect it, and it''s something that pretty drastically alters the course of both the book and Jennifer's life; yet it never breaks the narrative flow or feels out of place. This is also the same time that things start to begin getting very creepy, as Jennifer starts to have visions of her lost daughter, as well as a shadow figure.
Whilst the book never goes into full supernatural horror, something that I admit I was really hoping when I first read the description, it still manages to be quite chilling in places. I was hoping the book would lean into the horror more, but what we get instead is actually a lot better, it's a personal story that feels really grounded despite featuring spirits and murder because of it focusing so much on a very real, personal story about Jennifer and her loss.
I'm not going to talk too much about the latter parts of the book, because I don't want to spoil too much of the mystery or what happens, but the book did kind of go the direction I was expecting towards the end, yet still managed to throw a couple of curve balls in that took me by surprise and meant that I could never feel at ease with the narrative. There are so many twists and turns, and unexpected moments that I never got complacent, and was always excited to find out what was going to happen next.
A Twist of Karma managed to keep me entertained throughout, and I ended up reading it in big, long bursts because I wanted to know what happened next, and didn't want to put it down. I loved getting to know Jennifer and watching her journey. I look forward very much to seeing what Wendy Wanner does next.
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