A charmingly witty fantasy adventure starring Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, who must solve a dangerous medical mystery at a secret French spa for mummies.
Oasis Natrun: a private, exclusive, highly secret luxury health spa for mummies, high in the hills above Marseille, equipped with the very latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Dr. Greta Helsing, London’s de facto mummy specialist, it sounds like paradise. But when Greta is invited to spend four months there as the interim clinical director, it isn’t long before she finds herself faced with a medical mystery that will take all her diagnostic skills to solve.
A peculiar complaint is spreading among her mummy patients, one she’s never seen before. With help from her friends and colleagues — including Dr. Faust (yes, that Dr. Faust), a sleepy scribe-god, witches, demons, a British Museum curator, and the inimitable vampyre Sir Francis Varney — Greta must put a stop to this mysterious illness before anybody else crumbles to irreparable dust…
…and before the fabric of reality itself can undergo any more structural damage.
Review:
Dear Vivian Shaw,
Considering that I liked the first two books of this trilogy quite a bit, I am not sure why I delayed reading book 3. I mean I know that I have read reviews that made me pause – mummies have never been the favorite beings and I actually never read a book featuring mummies before, but I should have known that the third book is likely to be my cup of tea as well. And it was!
As the blurb tells you, Greta is invited to spend four months as an interim clinical director at the exclusive spa for mummies and supervise the treatments as needed.
Greta jumps at the opportunity but of course unexpected things start to happen at the resort and the patients get the illness whose origin cannot be explained for quite some time.
To be clear, I would not say that Greta solved the mystery but rather it was eventually solved not quite by itself, but because Greta and her friends got involved in investigating something else seemingly unrelated to the medical mystery, which ended up being very relevant. I cannot say much without spoilers. I would just say that I just found it so comforting to read about Greta trying to do her very best for her patients even if she could not figure out what was giving them so much pain right away.
I enjoyed reading about Greta and Varney very much. I thought Varney’s angstying about him being unworthy of Greta and unworthy of the relationship actually decreased in this book, and whatever was still there made sense and I liked that he tried to convince himself of the opposite – I thought it showed character growth nicely. I thought they were very sweet together and during the time of crisis I thought Varney was being supportive in the best way.
I was also very happy that the gay romance storyline got more page space. I was very happy seeing that these two characters got together in the last book, but I did think that it was fast and sudden and wanted to see more of them together in page.
And I really liked seeing more of Hell. Obviously this Hell does not have much to do with the “traditional” one, but I thought it was a very fun interpretation.
The only half a point I would deduct is for the villains just becoming remorseful too fast and not very believable.
Grade: B+
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Sirius
Sirius started reading books when she was four and reading and discussing books is still her favorite hobby. One of her very favorite gay romances is Tamara Allen’s Whistling in the Dark. In fact, she loves every book written by Tamara Allen. Amongst her other favorite romance writers are Ginn Hale, Nicole Kimberling, Josephine Myles, Taylor V. Donovan and many others. Sirius’ other favorite genres are scifi, mystery and Russian classics. Sirius also loves travelling, watching movies and long slow walks.
