Matchbox Girls

Freelance writer Marley Claviger, prone to anxiety attacks and visions of doom and disaster, is unexpectedly saddled with the four-year-old twin nieces of her friend Zachariah Thorne, who has inexplicably disappeared. Her problems progress rapidly from retrieving the twins' car seats from a locked car to protecting them from supernatural forces that want the girls for mysterious reasons of their own, while a California wildfire approaches over the hills. The opening chapters have a lot of promise; Marley is an engaging character with enjoyably strong female friendships, and as the otherworldly beings gather around her, the mood is intriguingly menacing. But eventually the narrative starts to drag under the weight of Tzavelas's (Nightlights: Disintegration) increasingly complicated mythology of angels and the Hush that keeps them from interfering with humans, the faeries and their own agendas, the Geometries of heaven, angelic and demon curses, kaiju, nephilim, and too much more.%C2%A0(Feb.)