Blog Archives
Moral Perspectives
A Haunting Connection is a multi-point-of-view paranormal fantasy centered around a woman with a unique gift struggling to trust those around her and a man who questions his own powers. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In the third grade, I was electrocuted. The hair dyer fell into the tub, and my mom had to revive me. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the paranormal and stories about life, death, and the energy that lingers. I love visiting old or historic places, and sometimes I get visions or ideas about what actually happened there. After I read the history, I’m often chilled by how similar my ideas and vision were to actual events.
The inspiration for The Ascension Series came after I delivered a package to a mysterious house on Cougar Mountain in Bellevue, WA. My scanner kept glitching when I went there, and my imagination created a story as to why. The house seemed to push me to start writing.
The other thing that inspired this book was Korean dramas. I watch them with my daughter and found myself sketching one out about an American in Korea caught in a complicated emotional situation. That concept worked perfectly for Brandon’s storyline.
Brandon acts as a kind of moral counterweight to Leah. How did you develop the contrast between their paths?
Brandon and Leah’s contrast really came from my travels. When I lived in Japan, I saw how people orient themselves around family, community, and the greater good. In Thailand, life seemed to be more about survival. People were more willing to take risks. In the U.S., our values create tension around personal desire and social expectations. We see these differences not only in cultures, but in age groups.
Leah is young and discovering her powers. She wants to help people, but that help comes in the form of manipulation. Over time, she finds herself justifying her actions for the greater good.
Brandon is a detective. He’s seen addiction and the misuse of power. So when he’s introduced to Yoona and given the chance to learn, he questions everything.
That contrast allowed me to explore the temptation of power and the discipline required to resist it. Their paths highlight perspective, life experience, and emotional maturity.
The multi-POV structure gives readers access to very different moral perspectives. What challenges did you face in balancing those viewpoints?
The biggest challenge was fully inhabiting each character—history, motivations, personal goals, and moral perspectives. I needed their actions to feel authentic to who they were, not a device to move the plot forward.
Another challenge was working with powerful characters. Yoona had to take actions that at times could be judged as morally wrong. But she sees the full picture and knows that in order to achieve necessary outcomes, she must bend her morality. That’s tricky when she is supposed to hold the moral high ground. But it works because Brandon, being skeptical, questions her, and in doing so, we explore the gray areas of morality.
When I traveled overseas, I saw knockoff brands everywhere, sold openly. In the U.S., doing the same thing could get you sued. But in Thailand, selling these items is a way to put food on the table. That raises questions: how do we judge what’s right or wrong when necessity forces choices we might otherwise reject? That tension is at the heart of A Haunting Connection.
Another major challenge I had was the cost. What is the cost for each character? For Leah, it’s her father’s trust, her best friend’s loyalty, and her own ability to choose. Power pulls, and each time she uses it, she loses the ability to resist.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 3 of The Ascension Series? Where will it take readers?
A Haunting Redemption opens with the same 1945 Nagasaki scene that started the first two books, but this time from Yoona’s perspective. Readers finally see the full story behind the pivotal moment that shaped the present.
From there, the story picks up where book two left off, with the long-anticipated disturbance Choi and Yoona have been talking about since book one. This event affects every character, altering lives and the world around them.
Then we race toward the confrontation between Ruth and Yoona. Who ends up redeeming themselves along the way, and how does that redemption change the world forever?
Leah Davenport survived the supernatural nightmare of A Haunting Deception,
but her struggles have only begun.
From Washington to Seoul, leaders and manipulators see her as the key to
shaping the world’s future. For Leah carries a rare gift: the ability to step inside
minds, to bend thoughts and feelings as if they were her own. And with every
use of her gift, she walks the path that destroyed those before her.
Caught between rivals, Leah must decide who to trust and how far she’s willing
to go to keep her freedom.
Meanwhile, Brandon Spencer trains with a shaman in Korea who promises similar
power, yet he begins to question whether such power is a gift, or a curse that
corrupts everyone who wields it.
Power has a price, and that price devours everything you love.
A Haunting Connection
A Haunting Connection opens with Ruth Jones in 1945, racing through wartime China and toward Japan under the shadow of psychic disturbances and her father’s possible corruption, but that opening functions less as the book’s destination than as its haunted fuse. The novel’s true body lives in 2025, chiefly in Lake Valley, Oregon, and Seoul, Korea, where Leah Davenport and Brandon Spencer are pulled into rival spiritual orbits: Leah’s powers deepen as her judgment frays, Brandon trains under the formidable Yoona while trying to remain morally intact, and Ruth, older, sharper, and vastly more dangerous, works behind the veil to recruit manipulators and bend world events toward a coerced peace. It’s a multi-POV paranormal fantasy with political ambitions, and it understands that a ghost story becomes more volatile when the dead are not the only things trying to possess the future.
I liked the way the book makes corruption feel incremental rather than theatrical. Leah is not simply “turning dark” in some ornamental fantasy sense; she is making one compromised choice after another, manipulating a boy to help Barb, carrying the consequences of a ghost attachment, intervening in Min Yun’s possession, absorbing dark energy in a desperate fight, and then beginning to press her will against the people around her. That slope is persuasive because it’s moral before it’s mystical. Brandon’s arc works as a counterweight. His sections have more bruised restraint: grief, caution, attraction, self-doubt, duty. I liked that his training under Yoona never settles into a clean mentor-student pattern. She is impressive, useful, strategic, and quietly terrifying. Her willingness to implant knowledge, manipulate minds, and justify ethically jagged actions gives the novel one of its best tensions: power here is never neutral, and wisdom is not the same thing as innocence.
I also appreciated how much narrative acreage the book claims, and how often that sprawl works in its favor. The Brandon–Su-Bin–Min Yun triangle could have stayed merely romantic intrigue, but it gets knotted into family violence, surveillance, revenge, and the uncanny. Leah’s visions reach across continents. Brandon gets drawn into a CIA-linked weapons operation that ends in a gun battle at the port. Ruth and Yoona are each recruiting, each planning, each interpreting the future through interference and incomplete knowledge. By the time the explosion in Lake Valley sends shockwaves through Yoona’s Circle and sparks a vision of Ruth striking Yoona down, the novel has widened from supernatural coming-of-age into something more combustible: a spiritual thriller about competing doctrines of order, control, and salvation.
I would hand this to readers of urban fantasy, paranormal fantasy, supernatural thriller, and multi-POV dark fantasy, especially those who like occult systems, psychic warfare, corruption arcs, and globe-spanning stakes. Readers who enjoy authors like V. E. Schwab, or series that let emotional damage and metaphysical conflict braid together, will find a strong current here, though this novel has a more conspiratorial and politically charged temperament than most of its peers. A Haunting Connection is a restless, high-voltage book about grief, influence, and the seduction of using power “for good.”
Pages: 495 | ASIN : B0GKGDN2C6
