Moonlight Rocks

About Yurie Kiri

Yurie Kiri’s novel Moonlight Beach won the 2020 Hollywood Book Festival’s award for Genre Fiction.  Moonlight Beach is about four friends who contact the spirit of dead Native American woman and have to fight for their lives against the serial killer who had been chasing her.  The second book in the series, where two of the surviving women of Rancho California take a trip to New Mexico, is called Moonlight Canyon.  The third book, called Moonlight Rocks is about a battle over a meteorite that may herald the birth of a new Messiah.  Besides the Moonlight series, Yurie Kiri has also written a series of books about Japan and virtual reality games; the first book is called Tokyo Games and the second one is called Osaka Games.

Dear Reader (author’s note) 

            Like Susan, who was featured in the first two Murder and Magic books, I love to drive.  One of the roads I’ve driven often is California State Highway 14, also known as the Aerospace Highway because of the nearby famous Edwards Air Force Base.  California State Highway 14 runs from the San Fernando Valley east of LA through the Mojave Desert before it hooks up with US 395 which runs north up the eastern side of the Sierra Pacific Mountains to some of California’s best ski areas.  CA 14 goes past many desert towns offering gas stations, truck stops and cafes; everything needed by the modern traveler.  On one of my drives north, I stopped at the Mojave Café for a sandwich and coffee.  Often dining alone, I’ve learned to entertain myself by eavesdropping on nearby diners. I keep my ears open for local rumors and stories which sometimes give me ideas for new books…one somewhat disturbing conversation was the inspiration for the following Murder and Magic book.

            Mojave (and its famous AF base) is commonly known as the gateway to outer space and once played a key role in the early US space program.  But Mojave is also a gateway to a lot of broken dreams, abandoned chicken ranches, ghost towns and derelict mines which claim more than a few lives every year.  You won’t see many headlines about the bodies littering the desert off the big highways east of LA because most of those bodies are either too easily buried in the empty desert or just dropped down an abandoned well or mine shaft.  If you stick to the highway, you also won’t see too many of the local people who live in and around those ghost towns and abandoned mines and ranches; you’ll need to get off CA 14 and take a dirt road into the desert to meet those desert people.  To take that off-road journey, you’ll need to leave your comfortable, luxury car behind and find something a little more sturdy to drive, otherwise your luxury car might break down and become decoration for a still life study in cactus or maybe just something to shoot at, then burn.  Once in a while, people do drive out to look at the wildflowers in the spring time or to star gaze, watch for falling stars and the occasional UFO.  But take care, if one of those falling stars makes its way all the way down… Fights have been known to erupt over the ownership of the resulting meteorites which can be worth considerable sums of money.  People who live on the edge are willing to go to extremes for something…for anything worth a little extra money.  And you have no idea about the kind of people who take up residence in abandoned chicken ranches or ghost towns.  They could be nice people or they could be not so nice and they could also be desperate or even a little bit insane.   You might stumble upon worshipers of the dark arts who have been known to congregate in the desert or perhaps you’ll find those who love everything and anything that steps out of a UFO.   And, of course, you will find Native American power circles as well as people who just want to get away and stay away from everyone and everything.

            One of the stories I overheard in the Mojave Café concerned a couple of locals who lived beyond the edge of town and made do with a little crime every now and then.  They thought they’d struck it rich one night when a meteorite fell to earth, but that particular meteorite had come to the attention of an assortment of very bad characters in the area – characters not necessarily working on the same page.  All that confusion over ownership was completely understandable considering how bright the meteor was in the dark desert night sky.  That meteor had been seen by close to a million people across the eastern parts of California and maybe more in western Nevada too.  A lot of people were willing to do just about anything to get a piece of that space rock, not only for its potential monetary value, but also due to the belief by many that meteors are considered to be messengers from beyond and even from God.  Some believed the meteor’s message was to announce the end of the world while others of a more positive leaning,  thought it was announcing the birth of a new Messiah.

Yurie Kiri (hiding somewhere in Japan to escape the plague)

Synopsis

            The desert east of Los Angeles has always been a little bit dangerous and not just because of the people who live out there.  Sure there are drug gangs and meth labs but there are also a lot of more or less natural dangers too such as abandoned mines and broken down ranches with fringe people living in them.  However, along with those dangers are a lot of natural rocky beauty and clear dark skies which attract amateur star gazers and campers.  One night a group of friends set up camp in that desert to watch the Leonid meteor shower.  However they aren’t the only people hoping to catch a falling star and when one does crash to earth nearby, the first person to get that meteorite becomes the target in a very deadly chase.  When the campers die and a woman disappears not only do the local police get involved but so does a group of Satan worshipers and other religious fanatics who feel that the meteor heralds the birth of a new Messiah.

Review

Moonlight Rocks: Murder and Magic by Yurie Kiri is the third book in the Murder and Magic series and it once again does not fail to deliver in a beautiful way that kept my heart pumping the entire way through. My heart is pounding as I write this review! Yurie has a way of weaving magical elements that most would not even begin to understand without the awesome descriptions given in the book with modern crime in way that I have never seen done before. If you have not read Yurie’s other books before picking this one up, I highly suggest that you do. Each of the books is even more intoxicating in its complexity than the last one with darkness dancing with what seems at first to be a sliver of light each time. The author is clearly knowledgeable about religions of all different kinds, which is something that I am always more impressed by with each different thing that I have read from Yurie. Without giving away too much here, at one point at the end of the book, someone (not naming for fear of giving too much away) makes a statement about Islam, Judaism, and Christianity that most people do not seem to grasp as it relates to God but that the author ones again shows their theological intellect by stating through the characters mouth. There are many different pieces to this book and giving just one away is going to give you a little bit too much of a look at this amazing story. I would suggest that anyone always make sure to read the introduction that the author gives at the beginning of the stories, as Yurie always tells the reader exactly how it was that the story idea came to be, and this story is amazing and gives the reader so much more context. Every time I read it, I always think of the author with a little smirk growing upon hearing the things that will be a part of a story later. All in all, what an absolutely amazing job.

Emily, Reviewer and fan.