Book Review | Old Soul by Susan Barker

About The Book

I’m unsure how quite to describe Old Soul as on its face it sounds like a very intriguing mystery but as you peel back each layer of the story I don’t think ‘mysterious’ quite cuts it. The book opens on Jake and Mariko both of whom have just missed their flight to Amsterdam from Osaka. They are perfect strangers brought together by inconvenient happenstance but perhaps by fate as well. In a way that only two people who will never meet again can, their conversation over dinner and drinks reveals a secret they both have in common.

Mariko’s estranged twin brother and Jake’s childhood friend both inexplicably died days after meeting a strange and beguiling woman. Their behavior changed in horrifying ways but it was more than that, it was as if they became someone else before they died. This chance meeting with Mariko sets Jake on the trail of this mysterious woman and all those who have met their end after crossing her path. The mystery of the woman spans both time and the globe but Jake is determined to unravel the secret of this never aging woman.

My Thoughts

Oh man, I loved this.

This book had me pacing around my house with my stomach clenched in a knot and yet it’s some of the most fun I’ve had reading a book in awhile. Susan Barker’s writing beautifully pulls you into this dark mystery right from the start. This story is told through the testimonies Jake has collected interspersed between a narrative following who you can only assume is The Woman. This left me trying to desperately piece together every clue along the way. With each new account I found myself feeling just as caught in the spiral of chaos that each narrator felt trying to understand what happened to the person they loved.

Each testimony of The Woman’s victims had a raw unsettling grip to it. I won’t lie, before I started this book I thought ‘Ah, she must be a vampire’ but I have never been more wrong. These testimonies speak to something far darker and vast. In every recounting you learn that the victims had their photo taken by the woman and that is the catalyst for the tumble into madness. What gave me those terrified feelings was how hopeless it felt. Once she’d met her victim there was nothing to stop it, no way to escape. The people who loved the ones lost are left in the wake of the unimaginable with stories no one would believe. The Woman brings devastation wherever she goes but they do not know it until it is too late.

I am infatuated with the creepy cosmic horror of it all. Old Soul is not an in your face type of horror but one that slithers in and unsettles you. It was an absolute joy to read. There is something about a book that leaves me on pins and needles the whole way through that I can’t get enough of and Old Soul really delivered.