Customer Reviews

A Circle of Souls

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this debut novel - a detective drama about child murder - the author's own love and respect for children, as well as his spiritual leanings, are the elements that save the story from being mere morbid entertainment. Child psychiatrist Preetham Grandhi has crafted a gripping, fast-forward tale that is a rewarding journey, although I found myself wishing for a slightly different path along the way (read on).

Two strengths of the book are worth mentioning right up front. First, the story is constructed in short chapters that, for the most part, alternate between two gradually converging storylines, "cross-cutting," in filmic terms. The result is an inescapable momentum that kept me turning pages. It was truly difficult to put down. Second, the medical-world details, the hospital and child-psych ward environments, were thoroughly convincing. Clearly, Grandhi knows of which he speaks. Less convincing for me were the police procedural details, but I don't intend to nitpick.

At work on a deeper level is a more important strength: the novel is not cynical, as one often expects of crime drama. The author's heart is in evidence throughout, from his dedication to "the devoted staff and precious children of House 5" all the way to the final chapter. And while that may occasionally result in a bit of unsophisticated prose or an air of naiveté in characters where it perhaps shouldn't be, in my estimation those are preferable to the heartlessness so often paraded as "truth." A lack of cynicism is, unfortunately, not often seen as a positive attribute in commercial literature (read on).

I'm not a fan of the crime fiction genre, so A Circle of Souls is not the type of novel I usually read. Its title and cover are intriguing in a gentle way, perhaps appealing mostly to women (my guess), and giving an impression of the sort of literary confessional or family drama that would be a likely choice of mine. However, the back cover copy gives a very different message. It uses the shock-talk of crime TV, seeming to aim its appeal at fans of Law and Order SVU. In particular, I take objection to the final sentence: "In this stunning psychological thriller, innocence gives way to evil, and trust lies forgotten in a web of deceit, fear, and murder." This statement is simply not true. It is bogus marketing-speak that misidentifies the target audience and misleads the reader. If this actually described the book, I would not be writing this review, because I would never have finished the novel.

A more accurate summary might be: "In this riveting psycho-spiritual thriller, the dawning consciousness of an invisible dimension is the tool that unravels a web of deceit, fear, and murder, helping innocence to triumph over evil." Significantly more important to this book's power than the gruesome murders and the cop-drama plotline (both clichés by now) are these elements: a little girl's recurring dream in which she communes with the spirit of a dead child, and a doctor's acceptance of his own soul's reincarnation (a bold stroke by the author, oddly omitted from all the marketing blurbs).

For me (and I admit that many readers may not share my angle on the book), A Circle of Souls is foremost a story about the spiritual awakening of a man of science. I wanted a deeper look into the hero Dr. Gram's surprising and life-changing discovery that he, a middle-class American trained for mainstream medical practice, can actually believe in his own soul's multiple lives, and in the ancient esoteric teachings of jyotish (Indian astrology). This realization should be both freeing and frightening, and deserves more exploration beyond its direct connection to catching a killer. Grandhi thankfully gives us a final short chapter that does indicate Dr. Gram's new level of understanding.

A Circle of Souls is a good first novel whose greatest strengths lie in those places where it steps outside its genre. In his future writing, I hope Dr. Grandhi trusts his instincts toward spirit and heart. I look forward to what comes next.

This page-turner was hard to put down. The author combines psychiatry with psychic phenomenon in a unique and gripping way. Looking forward to the next read!

Great combination of medical facts with fantasy.An excellent way to bring public awareness about modern medicine and the ensuing ethical problems.
Keep writing !!!

When a little girl is found brutally murdered, the local detective is in over his head. Leia Bines from the FBI is called in to help find the murderer. At the same time, seven year old Naya Hastings is having horrifying nightmares, which in turn set off a series of alarming events in Newbury Connecticut. These events bring together a group of individuals with little in in common short of finding a murderer, and preserving the innocence of the children of Newbury.


Little does Dr. Peter Gram realize the turn his life and beliefs will take, as he becomes involved with little seven year old Naya. His only goal is to find a solution to her somnambulism, which almost leads to her climbing over a second story railing during one of her episodes. What he finds is strange and almost impossible to believe. Naya appears to be communicating with the murdered little girl, during her sleeping episodes. The perceptiveness of the hand drawn pictures she draws from her dreams, as well as their accuracy, put Peter and Naya in the sites of a cold blooded killer.


Will the cumulative information and the strange yet terrifying drawings by a child, lead Leila and Peter to the killer before he can kill again?


Preetham Grandhi has written a horrifying yet hope filled book, and filled it with a cast of well written, real and extremely likable characters.


Dr Peter Gram is a child Psychiatrist that is assigned to Naya when she is brought into the hospital. He is kind and extremely attuned to children. He talks to them on a level they respond to and gains their trust. He is a workaholic and follows up on the background of Naya on his time off, and while in the beginning he does not believe what Naya is telling him, he is able to listen to her and keep the communication channel open by just paying attention. As pieces start coming together and he gets pulled more into the story, he moves from a person of trust to a sort of hero.


Leia Bines is with the FBI, and has worked with the CIC, the FBI's crimes against children unit. She has gone through some tough times and while very good at what she does, she is open and caring. She has concerns that she will not be able to find the killer. When she finally takes Dr. Peter Gram off her suspect list, she is open and willing to look at other alternatives, rather then leaving the crime unsolved. She is fearless and sometimes jumps before looking at all the possibilities, which makes her very human.


Naya is a wonderful little girl; she is adopted but has only ever known her adoptive parents. She is very well loved and is often sad and lonely in the hospital where she is being evaluated. She is open and trusting, and very bewildered by the behavior she encounters during her stay at the facilities. She is funny and caring and everything a little girl should be.


This story is a look at the dark side of humanity, and how both nurture and nature often both have a hand in the making of monsters. It also gives a glimpse into a world of hopes and dreams, of innocence and childhood. This is a great story and well written. It is somewhat graphic and may not be suitable for some readers. If you like a story with a different twist this will be right up your alley.

In A Circle of Souls 10 year old Janet Troy disappears one day after getting off the school bus. As a short cut walking home, she takes the path along Willow Lake and is never heard from again.

Dr. Peter Gram works at the hospital and specializes in pediatric medicine. Late one night a 7 year old is brought into the ER and they page Dr. Gram to evaluate her. Naya Hastings has been having vivid nightmares and has been sleepwalking dangerously. Her parents are in fear of her hurting herself during her dream states. Meanwhile agent Leia Bines has been called back to work from her vacation in Hawaii to investigate the dissapearance of Janet Troy in Connecticut.

The story gets very creepy once Naya's dreams become more vivid, and take a paranormal aspect. She begins to see and speak to Janet Troy in these dreams. Janet gives Naya tips and clues about her death and murderer. Naya then passes these clues on to Dr. Peter Gram through vivid drawings.

I found A Circle of Souls to be a page turner. The story took off from page one and just kept on going. It was a fast paced thriller with plenty of plot twists and turns to keep me hooked until the final page. The story had some great, well developed characters. I found myself trying to figure out who the killer was and hoping Leia Bines would finally arrest him. I liked that there was a strong, female investigator on the case. The reader also gets a look into the killers mind and finds out why this person is so sick.

This was a great book, I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys a good, suspenseful thriller with a bit of paranormal twist to it. Like I said, it got very creepy once Naya starts to talk to Janet in her dreams. I got goosebumps while reading. I felt like the author did a good job when writing about Janet and what happened to her, it wasn't overwhelming to the reader.

I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. It has the elements of several different styles of writing, including horror, mystery and psychological thriller. And it was also refreshing in that there was no sex or vulgar language.

However, there are vivid descriptions of murder that could potentially make some readers queasy.

I've always been a fan of this type of story. I cut my serious reader teeth on Stephen King and, at one time, that's about the only author I'd follow. It was when I ran out of books by King that I began branching out to different authors and genres.

"A Circle of Souls" was sent to me by the author and I'm glad I agreed to review his book.

There are several elements I liked about Preetham's style of writing. First, I liked his short, punchy chapters. I also enjoyed the way he wove the different stories together to come full circle to where they connected.

I also liked how he described the characters so you really felt like you knew them and understood their thought processes. You knew whether you were supposed to like a character or not because their personalities came through in the writing.

Plus, it was an interesting story line integrating several belief systems, including Hinduism and Jamaican voodoo.

As you get toward the end of the book and you think you have it figured out, Preetham throws a curve ball and provides a surprise ending that makes perfect sense.

Great read, super writer ... I'm looking forward to more work by this author in the future.

Psychological thrillers have got to be one of my favorite books to read. And yet for the past ten months or so I feel like I have completely abandoned them for the sake of discovering and getting familiar with other genres. In the end, my guilt and my `favoritism' drove me to reach out for A Circle of Souls by Preetham Grandhi and right now I am reminded of what a feast I was missing out on by putting thrillers on a back burner.

The book starts off with a murder of a ten years old girl and it keeps you in its grips from then on. Newbury, CT is a seemingly quiet, peaceful town and the murder is all the more shocking because of that. We have an FBI agent Leia Bines, a child psychiatrist Peter Gram, who is also a nephew of a local senator, and a score of law-enforcement people trying to find a killer who not only murdered the girl but did it in a very twisted way. Dr. Peter Gram also has a new patient, a seven-year-old Naya whose inexplicable nightmares seem to have no medical basis and all of a sudden turn out to be too important to the murder case to be missed. And so, the race to find this brutal killer before he finds another innocent victim starts.

I was really taken by A Circle of Souls and its author Preetham Grandhi. It is his debut work and I think he did an excellent job. I have read scores of thrillers, especially psychological ones, and therefore I do consider myself an amateur expert on this subject. I can tell you that it's no easy task to write a gripping tale that will keep the reader with their nose in the book until the tale is over. And I can also safely tell you that Mr. Grandhi accomplished just that. There aren't too many characters which keeps the picture simple and clear enough for the reader to concentrate on the main plot and follow it without getting confused about who's who and who's done what. When I write simple, I don't mean a story with not much depth to it. Quite the opposite, there is a lot happening but it's easy to follow all the events and I think it's a plus that readers are given a few main characters to think about without being blindsided by a parade of people who bring nothing to the table and their only purpose seems to be confusion. I think that most of you know what I'm talking about. Many possibly good thrillers got ruined this way. A Circle of Souls is thankfully not one of them. For a debut novel and beyond that as well, it's a very good, sometimes even scary and full of action thriller. I enjoyed it from the first page to the last (I know it sounds a little cliché but in this case it really is true) and I am already waiting impatiently for what Mr. Grandhi produces next because he certainly is a skilled author that knows how to give us good thrills.

This debut book is extremely well-written, has a tightly woven plot, and well-developed characters. Beginning with seemingly separate stories: a brutally murdered young girl and another young girl with hellacious nightmares, the author moves us inexhorably toward the meeting of these two separate stories and blends them believably into one. While there are no clues to the murder, and no reason (either physical or mental) for the nightmares, they are related, and the pychiatrist treating the young nightmare victim intuits their relationship from drawings made by his patient. As he searches for the meaning of her drawings, and recognizes the locale in the pictures, he anguishes over how to help his patient and whether to help the FBI agent who has been called in to investigate the case.

This is not a normal murder mystery suspense thriller. The characters are the strong point in this story, even the bad guys are well developed, with sound background and motivation to pull the reader in. There is a large dose of the paranormal--which I normally avoid, but which I found intruiging--entwined with Indian cultural traditions, and Jamaican/West African folklore. There are several side issues and players adding enough doubt in the readers mind to make it interesting and challenging to figure out 'whodunit.'

It was written in short chapters that encouraged the reader to read 'just one more' before putting the book down, and in the end, just reading straight through. Let's hope that Preetham Grandhi has more such well-written tales up his sleeve. This one is a winner.

I received an ARC of A Circle of Souls in the mail several weeks ago and immediately added it to my pile of books to be read. The author, Dr. Preetham Grandhi, contacted me through a book review website and asked if I would be interested in reviewing his debut novel. Excited, I said yes. Eventually my TBR pile dwindled and I made my way to A Circle of Souls.

This novel is a psychological thriller and a murder mystery, mixing in with it elements of the paranormal. Any fan of shows like CSI, House MD, or Law & Order will easily be able to relate to the book. While I like these types of shows, I have only read a very few books in this genre, so I started the book in slight trepidation, slight intrigue.

The prologue was riveting and tragic, descriptive and vague, and bloody. It was one of those scenes that you can (morbidly) visualize. A young girl is found murdered in a small university town in Connecticut, and a FBI agent comes to investigate. Another young girl is enrolled into a child psychiatric hospital for evaluation. Her doctor, Peter, notices some peculiar attributes to the girl and a possible connection to the murder. From here, the story takes off until an impressive (albeit short) climax.

Some things I liked about A Circle of Souls. The book was fast paced and read quickly. It kept me up late one night flipping pages until I was too tired to continue. I really liked the care and compassion Peter had for his patients. The idea behind the slaaf was intriguing. The book was logical, succinct, and laid out cleanly.

Some things I did not like about A Circle of Souls. At times it felt like there were too many POV chapter switches in too close a time. I felt some of these chapters, especially early in the book, could be combined into making longer chapters. I felt that some of the backgrounds between characters were too similar. The book was logical, too succinct, and too clean.

Overall, I was impressed by Dr. Grandhi's debut. There were several simple editing mistakes (like not paragraphing between dialogue mainly), this was not too distracting, and the book was an ARC, too. It felt good to read a book in a genre I rarely venture into, and I enjoyed the read.

[...]

I was surprised that this is Preetham Grandhi's first novel. I was interested by the second page and the suspense didn't let up from there. Although I could guess the murderer halfway through, I did not guess the twists and turns this book would take.



I enjoyed and liked the characters in this book. There was sufficient background of all involved to paint a picture of each personality, especially the main character, Peter. I hear that Grandhi plans to write another book featuring Peter and I'm excited to read it. He is very likeable.



Although some might be put off that this book is about the murder of a little girl, I didn't feel that the details were distressingly graphic. The language is clean and the prose flows well. I wasn't bored for a minute and would recommend this novel for anyone who likes a good thriller.