The Cameron children worried that they will not get the toys they asked for for Christmas because their mother is a last minute shopper. The uncle that Trisha Frankel has lived with most of her life with has died. The only option she has is to find the father she does not know, even though her uncle said, “He was no good.” Trisha takes her dog, Mitch to search out her father and find out what he is like for herself. Along the way, her dog is stolen. The most likely suspect in the dog’s disappearance is a man connected to the Cameron children Phoebe, Tucker, and Kirby. Phoebe, Tucker, and Kirby are busy trying to figure out if their Christmas gifts will arrive. But helping Trisha makes them realize that sometimes the lives of others are more important than their own interests, especially at Christmas time.

Marta Moran Bishop’s Darkness Descends is powerful, gripping work! It’s a compelling, sometimes scathing prequel to her first series title, The Between Times. Set in a dystopian city-state, Bishop indicts a patriarchal oligarchy that feeds a rape culture at the same time as it plots the overthrow of the rule of law with the anarchic rule of a well-managed mob psyche. The Roman people were given bread and circuses. The crowds in Darkness Descends are handed Rebecca, Jewell’s mother, and a crucial charter character of the series, who faces public torture, humiliation, assault, and finally, auto-da-fé, burning at the stake, which she accepts as her fate as the ultimate sacrifice for a greater good. Bishop pulls no punches. The blows land all the harder when one realizes she is not working solely from imagination. She has incorporated into her literary tapestry the warp of today’s culture, with the weft of…