{"id":6416,"date":"2026-05-25T11:14:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T11:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6416"},"modified":"2026-05-25T11:14:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T11:14:00","slug":"fishers-luck-by-rhya-tenney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6416","title":{"rendered":"Fisher\u2019s Luck by Rhya Tenney"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHauntings or hallucinations?\u201d asks this surreal, sleepless mystery for fans of Caddo Lake<\/em>, Bodies<\/em>, and seaside towns swirling with paranormal activity<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Fisher\u2019s Luck <\/em>is both dreamlike and doomed, a haunted woman\u2019s history intertwined with her family\u2019s haunted house. It\u2019s the literary equivalent of watching a new episode of a familiar TV show and noticing that something\u2019s off-kilter: You\u2019re sure the characters must be in a dream, a flashback, or a fantasy, but you have to keep watching to find out.<\/p>\n

Laurel has a long history of hallucinations and a traumatic childhood that her therapeutic hypnosis sessions are bringing to the surface. When she visits the mansion her family owns\u2014and the beach where she nearly drowned as a child\u2014for her cousin\u2019s wedding, her hallucinations are suddenly amplified.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Set in a seaside town that cozy mystery readers will adore, Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em> has beachcombing guild lore, generations of local gossip, and hidden pockets of paranormal activity everywhere Laurel turns. Readers are fully immersed in her unsteady sense of place, time, and truth, where nightmares bleed into the edges of reality, and strange things catch your eye and pull on your soul, but disappear when you turn around to look.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The family house, which operates as a bed-and-breakfast, is being assessed for paranormal activity when Laurel arrives. Her aunt is delightfully pragmatic about hiring the ghost-detecting team, hoping for a simple solution to banish whatever spirit is affecting their five-star review status. This is how Laurel learns that her memories of feeling watched in this house and seeing people in the windows of unoccupied rooms have been mirrored in reviews from guests who stayed at the property. Her aunt is alarmed, asking Laurel, \u201c\u2018Why didn\u2019t you say?\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Would you have believed me?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>It\u2019s true, but not unkind to either party. Laurel\u2019s family is remarkably comfortable discussing her hallucinations\u2014without judgement or stigma. Fisher\u2019s Luck <\/em>is the most relatable depiction of a family that\u2019s lovingly-familiar with long-term mental illness I\u2019ve ever read. Author Rhya Tenney\u2019s expertly-crafted eerie mood balances precariously alongside Laurel\u2019s grip on reality as she juggles clues and conversations with ghosts to maintain a facade of normalcy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the situation is bigger than their haunted house; \u201cthe whole shoreline has erupted with paranormal activity.\u201d <\/em><\/strong>As wedding plans progress, more guests report sleepless nights filled with nightmares, out-of-body experiences, and unidentifiable sounds in hallways.People all around town are disappearing, waking up with strange injuries, falling into comas and, by some \u201cfantastical coincidence,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> having the same dreams\u2014though for some, they\u2019re more like \u201cadjoining nightmares.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> There\u2019s a vivid sense that things are falling apart in slow-motion, so beautiful and bizarre that everyone stops what they\u2019re doing to watch. Dreamlike scenes drenched in sea motifs are made captivatingly complex by Laurel\u2019s long history of hallucinations. Wall art from Laurel\u2019s therapist\u2019s office talks to her while she\u2019s at the beach; mysterious spirits appear to Laurel with warnings, mistaking her for someone else; photos come to life as memories she can walk into and get lost inside.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLaurel closed her eyes, counted to three, and opened them. Nothing had changed. So, not a dream. A hallucination, maybe? He wasn\u2019t frightening her, so why not chat a bit? Find out what her mind was trying to warn her about\u2014her mind, no doubt. \u201cSo, what is this warning?\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Laurel is comfortably detached from reality, but the paranormal activity has her suddenly wondering if her visions are hallucinations or hauntings. Could she be a Seer meeting spirits from other realms, or is her mental health simply fracturing? Quietly determined and losing sense of time and place, she feels compelled to correct the paranormal disharmony. If not to rescue the wedding ceremony, to understand the messages behind her hallucinations. <\/em><\/strong>Tenney reflects a deep understanding of (and compassion for) Laurel as an unreliable narrator. I frequently felt overwhelmed by waves of emotion about the care and consistency written into Laurel\u2019s mental health troubles. Her internal dialogue is an endless sea of mental math to determine symptoms from reality. It\u2019s an accurate, insightful representation of a coping method many readers will be familiar with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI almost drowned once,\u201d she blurted, unsure why. \u201cRight here.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI know,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that\u2019s why my mind is conjuring you now.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em>\u2019s most intriguing storylines follows a spirit who appears to Laurel but believes that she has appeared to him. He recognizes her as the girl who was rescued from drowning. He was on the beach that day, but there\u2019s a deeper connection. Both characters have traumatic pasts (he was catastrophically struck by lightning as a child) that corrupted the reliability of their memories, making it difficult to navigate their shared history. The author strategically deploys shocking reveals like a well-timed wave, slowly building a sense of dread from a direction we aren\u2019t even watching, knocking us off our feet and leaving us to tread water, gasping for air as we recalibrate reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Late in the novel, a sharp, unexpected turn takes this moody mystery into sci-fi conspiracy territory and feels slightly disconnected to the story, devoid of its dreamlike magic. Readers may be turned off by this twist (or, like me, find themselves losing interest in new characters), but Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em> does return to itself with all the heart and intrigue we\u2019ve come to love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fans of the time-loop murder-mystery show Bodies<\/em> (especially if they liked its time-machine conspiracy twist) and missing-person thriller Caddo Lake <\/em>will be captivated by Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em>. It\u2019s perfect for readers who can\u2019t resist diving into haunted histories and can\u2019t get enough of dark mysteries set by the sea. If you were entranced by the Dead Boy Detectives entering the nightmare memory-loop of a haunted family home and the representation of the mind as a physical place to unpack memories in The<\/em> Flight Attendant<\/em> or Locke & Key<\/em>, you\u2019ll love spending time with Laurel. This book is for readers who believe that a historically unreliable, potentially unhinged woman who trusts herself to save the day may actually be onto something\u2014and would follow her to the edge of the world even if she isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Laurel finds her way back to the ominous beach setting of her cousin\u2019s all-but-abandoned wedding, where Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em> ends on a full-circle note that had my heart soaring and my fingers frantically typing to search for the sequel. There are intriguing unanswered layers to the problems Laurel solved and the lives she saved, but more than anything, I can\u2019t wait to reunite with the strange, passionate misunderstood residents of this seaside town, who charmed me and captured my heart. Do yourself a favor and let the siren song of Fisher\u2019s Luck<\/em> lure you in.<\/p>\n

The post Fisher\u2019s Luck by Rhya Tenney<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHauntings or hallucinations?\u201d asks this surreal, sleepless mystery for fans of Caddo Lake, Bodies, and seaside towns swirling with paranormal activity Fisher\u2019s Luck is both dreamlike and doomed, a haunted woman\u2019s history intertwined with her family\u2019s haunted house. It\u2019s the literary equivalent of watching a new episode of a familiar TV show and noticing that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}