NIGHT MAGIC

The city of Philadelphia continues to turn wild after dark in this sequel to Nightstruck (2016).

When the sun goes down on the quarantined city, chaos reigns while innocents huddle safely inside. Vandals and hoodlums calling themselves “the Nightstruck” roam the streets doing whatever they please, and now 17-year-old white teen Becket is one of them. The devastatingly handsome—and inhuman—leader of the Nightstruck, Aleric, wants Becket for himself, but Becket can’t quite give herself over to him. Meanwhile, the rest of the world tries to figure out what to do with the cursed city. The first half of the novel submerges Becket in the devil-may-care world of the Nightstruck, but the chaos overstays its welcome. There are plenty of mysteries surrounding this nightly curse, but spending all this time with burglars and sex fiends does little to illuminate them. The characters remain stagnant for this entry, and, in a classic middle-volume sag, the story concludes with characters right back where they were at the end of the last book. Most disappointing is the absence of scares. The previous entry was filled with bumps and thumps in the night, but now that entire scenes are set with monsters in the background, the spark is gone. The remains are a plodding mystery that characters are barely interested in. If the characters don’t care, why should readers?

A disappointing follow-up to a promising first chapter.