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The Black Candle: A Detective Wilkens Thriller (Anti-Occut Unit, Book 1)
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May 21, 2026
Review:The Black Candle-
ARC copy given by Silas Morrow
Silas Morrow doesn’t write thrillers. He writes quiet. _The Black Candle_ follows Detectives Grant and Wilkens of the Anti-Occult Unit, but the real case is atmosphere.
-What works
Characters that feel human, not archetypes. Grant and Wilkens are contrasting but neither is a cliché. Wilkens prays before every case. Grant remembers his sister dying of meningitis while his mother prayed. They carry weight, not just guns. Morrow is good at “humanizing the characters”— you feel the kind of pain that disappears in a room but never leaves a person.
Morrow’s best lines use antithesis. “The silence came in immediately, not the dead silence of the crime scene, but the living one, layered with small sounds.” That contradiction sets the tone to the perfect pitch. He does it again with “Earth and the dry sweetness of the old decay” — a sensory paradox that balances residual sugar against something aged, bitter, acidic. The prose is structural. It builds rooms in your head.
The symbolism isn’t subtle and it doesn’t need to be. The scream of hadeda ibis becomes a cultural alarm: “a murder has taken place, the community cannot be called safe.” Shrike birds, the “butcher birds,” appear after violence. A Cape sparrow shows up in the graveyard — “symbolic for hope, togetherness.”The birds testify before the people do.
The book is full of reflective passages. “Fear was the body’s misreading of information.”“A human outline that stopped where a human outline should not stop.” Simple lines with a haunting, eerie feeling. Morrow trusts one sentence to carry a scene
The thrill in this thriller is not top notch. I never got that blood rush I usually feel reading crime. The plot twist lands, and the book has a “nice feeling” — melancholy, textured — but the pacing is deliberate to a fault. If you want chase scenes, look elsewhere. This is a book about the ghost of the morning that had happened and could not be taken.
Verdict 3.5 /5
Bottom line-
Not for adrenaline junkies. For readers who like their crime fiction literary, layered with small sounds, and full of South African heat and shadow. Morrow’s effect is effortless. You see the room. You hear the hadeda. You feel the silence.
Read it for the vibe, not the car chases. If you like sentences that haunt you this is your book.
ARC copy given by Silas Morrow
Silas Morrow doesn’t write thrillers. He writes quiet. _The Black Candle_ follows Detectives Grant and Wilkens of the Anti-Occult Unit, but the real case is atmosphere.
-What works
Characters that feel human, not archetypes. Grant and Wilkens are contrasting but neither is a cliché. Wilkens prays before every case. Grant remembers his sister dying of meningitis while his mother prayed. They carry weight, not just guns. Morrow is good at “humanizing the characters”— you feel the kind of pain that disappears in a room but never leaves a person.
Morrow’s best lines use antithesis. “The silence came in immediately, not the dead silence of the crime scene, but the living one, layered with small sounds.” That contradiction sets the tone to the perfect pitch. He does it again with “Earth and the dry sweetness of the old decay” — a sensory paradox that balances residual sugar against something aged, bitter, acidic. The prose is structural. It builds rooms in your head.
The symbolism isn’t subtle and it doesn’t need to be. The scream of hadeda ibis becomes a cultural alarm: “a murder has taken place, the community cannot be called safe.” Shrike birds, the “butcher birds,” appear after violence. A Cape sparrow shows up in the graveyard — “symbolic for hope, togetherness.”The birds testify before the people do.
The book is full of reflective passages. “Fear was the body’s misreading of information.”“A human outline that stopped where a human outline should not stop.” Simple lines with a haunting, eerie feeling. Morrow trusts one sentence to carry a scene
The thrill in this thriller is not top notch. I never got that blood rush I usually feel reading crime. The plot twist lands, and the book has a “nice feeling” — melancholy, textured — but the pacing is deliberate to a fault. If you want chase scenes, look elsewhere. This is a book about the ghost of the morning that had happened and could not be taken.
Verdict 3.5 /5
Bottom line-
Not for adrenaline junkies. For readers who like their crime fiction literary, layered with small sounds, and full of South African heat and shadow. Morrow’s effect is effortless. You see the room. You hear the hadeda. You feel the silence.
Read it for the vibe, not the car chases. If you like sentences that haunt you this is your book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review