It has been more than a decade since I read the first two books in Cherie Priest's Eden Moore trilogy. I don't know why I delayed reading the last one; I loved the first two, after all, and am generally a fan of Priest's work. I guess it just got lost in the sea of books I have on my to-read piles, so when I was sorting through some books recently and pulled this one from a stack, I was honestly surprised to realize it had slipped through the cracks. No time like the present, right?

Of course, it took only a matter of pages before I was sucked right back into Priest's world of southern gothic intrigue. The tale starts in 1973, years before Eden's birth, when two youngsters -- Eden's mother Leslie, just 11 years old at the time, and her aunt Louise, 14 -- break into an abandoned armory for kicks and find themselves trapped when a burst dam spills over the banks of the Tennessee River and floods the area. And something -- we don't know what -- comes knocking.

Flash forward to the present. Eden, who can talk to ghosts, is helping out a reporter friend with an alleged haunting at a ritzy Chattanooga hotel. The ghost, it turns out, is all too real, and kind of angry, and Eden soon has the cuts from flying glass to prove it.

But there's a lot more going on, from the imminent visit from Eden's half-brother (who no longer wants to kill her) to the constant pounding rain and a dam break upriver that once again causes the Tennessee to rise. There's also the mysterious disappearances of several street people along the river and the one not-so-crazy-after-all skater dude who seems to be the only person who notices.

Eden is drawn into all of it, but the hotel ghost is not very helpful and she isn't sure she believes the rumors of bodies rising from the water and killing people. (Let's not call them zombies, OK?) But it turns out there's a dark history buried in the water, and the flood is bringing it all to the surface. And one soul in particular is linked to the hotel ghost, and she's had a very long time to build up her rage.

Not Flesh Nor Feathers builds up some real tension as the waters continue to rise and the horrors beneath rise with them. Priest carefully avoids revealing too much about the creatures themselves until late in the story, which ramps the anxiety level up several notches. And her descriptions of Eden and her allies as they battle the floodwaters will leave readers feeling quite sodden themselves by the end.

I have quite enjoyed Priest's more recent writing, but I have to admit, I've missed Eden. I enjoyed revisiting her world and, truth be told, wish we might see her again sometime.

[ visit Cherie Priest's website ]