Abyss: Book 3

Mysteries of Septagram #3

by Paul Bryers

Jade is in St Severa's Catholic boarding school in the wilds of Cumbria. She is hiding from her mad-scientist father, Kobal, who is on the run from half the police forces of the world for illegaly experimenting in genetics to create a new breed of perfect human. Jade is part of his personal project, one of his own seven special children born of seven different surrogate mothers. But even St Severa's isn't safe. Driven by his obsession with gathering the children together, Kobal can read Jade's mind. He has five - he needs Jade, and her help to find the seventh. Only the arrival of Benedict, claiming to be Kobal's brother, saves her from Kobal's clutches. In a race to find the missing seventh child before Kobal does, Benedict sweeps Jade on a fantastic train journey across Europe to the mountainous of Dracula legend. From the empire of the dead in the catacombs, to a lost Romanian monastery on a remote mountain crag, the final journey takes them to the climax in a ruined castle of Transylvania. And the abyss at its heart.

Genres: Fantasy

324 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

aka Seth Hunter

Paul Bryers is the author of many fine novels, the most recent of which is THE PRAYER OF THE BONE. He is a TV and film director when he is not writing and he lives in London.

Reviews

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered,after taking this book out of the library, that it was the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the first two, so I've missed much of the backstory, and I'm not really qualified to review it.

Jade runs away from her boarding school in Cumbria, England, just before being expelled, and her foster mother Emily meets her, and they are then chased by Jade's real father, Kobal, and escape from him with some difficulty, and they are joined by a Benedict, a long-lived member of a miliary monastic order. Benedict believes that Kobal wants to use his seven children, by seven different mothers, for an evil purpose. He had gathered six of them, but Jade had escaped (presumably in one of the earlier books) and Kobal was looking for the seventh. So the three of them set out to travel to Romania, where they hope to find the seventh child.

It was quite a pleasant read, with lots of adventures during the travels, though the denouement was a bit over the top.

[Francesca Vella · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was still a lot of confusion and spelling mistakes. It had so much potential in everything. With the kinds coming from different elements to the vampire and wolves backstory and it all ended with fast deaths that you could have anticipated from a hundred mile and money. It’s better than the second book and I actually wanted to finish the book immediately but it was still a bit mehh. It could have been so much better and I don’t believe there is another book but if there was it would have focused on the children. And comparing a child wolf hybrid to a person with autism is wrong on so many levels. However Kobal did have his reasons for whatever he was doing which I still don’t understand, with the threat of war and viruses to us not handling the environment properly. However still have no idea how that links to vampires and angels

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abyss is a nice and fairly easy book to read. It focusses on a Young Adult public and this is noticeable in the easy solutions and coming of age theme. Mix this with magic, mysticism, strange abilities and a weird father who plans something evil....and voila you have a fairly fun book to read.

I personally would have liked some more depth to the characters and maybe a less easy solution. After thelong build up this ending was a bit to easy and abrupt. Still for a lot of readers this will prove to be a nice book to dig into.