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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Mitch Russo’s Sacred Crossroads follows Noble Manning, a sixty-year-old hardware-store owner in Cedar Springs, Massachusetts, whose life has been built around routine and measurable facts. Strange shadows begin appearing inside Manning’s Hardware, then objects shift in ways Noble cannot explain. When his daughter Sarah returns carrying a family key that seems to respond to the store, longtime employee Jenny Martinez recognizes signs connected to warnings left by her grandmother Rosa. As other residents report equally impossible changes, business association leader Harold Whitaker, fearing Cedar Springs is slipping beyond reason, quietly seeks outside help. Suspicion begins spreading through the town, forcing Noble to confront what his family may have protected for generations before the changes around him draw a response Cedar Springs cannot contain on its own.
Mitch Russo’s Sacred Crossroads is an incredible contemporary fantasy, with a world as ambitious as it is eerie. Noble is a fantastic protagonist whose methodical nature grounds the story, shown when he recognizes the fear beneath Marcus Whitman’s anger as the banker’s figures begin changing. I love Diana Wells, the federal agent, whose clinical certainty makes her formidable as she opens her briefcase on Main Street. The world building is massive and much of it is through systems classifying magic. For example, Stanford Blackwell carries equipment calibrated to measure reality distortion. Still, it’s the near cinematic descriptions of Cedar Springs that steal the scenes, from impossible light bending across the town beneath the Grand Hotel at dusk, to a black sedan turning onto Main Street at sunset. Well written and immersive, readers who enjoy darker small-town fantasy will adore this.
