We’re just a month into 2019, but the best book I’ve read this year is The Night Crossing by Robert Masello, who is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. The Night Crossing is a suspense-filled historical fantasy about the events that inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Review
The Night Crossing follows in the wake of Masello’s The Jekyll Revelation, which tells the secret story that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both stories involve famous writers, Stevenson and Stoker, as main characters who become involved in supernatural events that are eerily similar to their most famous works. In The Night Crossing, Stoker is an aspiring novelist fascinated with the occult. But after he comes to the aid of a young woman whose child died under suspicious circumstances, he finds himself drawn into a deadly mystery involving spirits, the undead, and Egyptian necromancy.
As the mystery begins to unravel, Stoker discovers that someone in London is using ancient Egyptian magic to achieve immortality by feeding off the souls of dying children. Just like a vampire feeds off the blood of his victims. Stoker soon takes on the role of his fictional vampire hunter, Abraham Van Helsing. He is joined by a brave and beautiful archeologist, aptly named Mina, who ends up inspiring another character in Stoker’s famous tale. Even more, Mina has a history with the killer, who may have murdered her father to obtain the occult magic he uses on his victims. Together, Stoker and Mina, like Van Helsing and Mina Harker, become determined to hunt down the killer and put an end to his evil ways.
The story gripped me from the start and kept me turning the pages into the wee hours of the night. Robert Masello is a master of suspense, but it’s his use of magical and supernatural elements that I enjoy the most. This was true of The Einstein Prophecy and The Jekyll Revelation, and The Night Crossing did not disappoint! If you like historical fantasy filled with mystery and suspense, you’ll love The Night Crossing.