“First, she was an acolyte. Then, a rogue. Finally, a catalyst. Now she’s declaring war on Hell itself.”

I think I made a mistake with this one. I read horror in the description and dove in head first before I realized this was the third in a series. Oops. I was probably a quarter of the way through when I realized why I was a bit lost but I continued on anyway. About halfway through the story seemed like it could have probably ended and the rest of the book was just filler. But I’m not sure if it felt that way because I hadn’t read the previous books or if it really did just come to a halt in the middle. I enjoyed the story up to that point, the writing is engaging and overall the story was good.

So, if you want to read this make sure you have read the first two beforehand. I will probably start in the correct order and come back to this. If I do, I’ll make sure to update my review.

eARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

The 3rd installment of the Jack Harper Trilogy. The story comes full circle.

Jack finally finished with the cult and the mercenaries. Now she's facing the end goal - killing the Builder and resurrecting him. Before she can even get to that point, the people she trusted deceived her. With her life on the line, Jack has to make decisions that change everything. With those decisions come consequences that she will have to confront.

The ending wasn't what I expected, which isn't a bad thing whatsoever. It was good! Some of the decisions that Jack made, made me question her decisions, but they turned out to be alright in the end.

Throughout this whole series, I wasn't expecting things to go the way they did. To be honest, I had no idea how it was even going to happen regardless, but I'm happy with how it ended. I can't wait to hear about any more of L.C. Barlow's books!

ARC provided by Netgalley for an honest review.

this was a great entry in the Jack Harper Trilogy, it had what I enjoyed from the previous books and I enjoyed the characters in this world.

Peak by L.C. Barlow.
Jack Harper trilogy book 3.
First, she was an acolyte. Then, a rogue. Finally, a catalyst.
Now she’s declaring war on Hell itself.
Jack Harper can raise the dead, and those she resurrects she also controls. She belongs to an ancient race of magical beings called “ferrics,” though she is the first of her kind with this power.
Having just escaped Jonathon Roth and his kill-for-hire organization, her new target is the demonic Builder, architect of damnation.
She must act fast, too, because the ferrics’ last countermeasure—a plasmatic weapon—is dwindling away. Meanwhile, her closest confidante, the ferric Lutin, has come under attack, all while her brother Alex joins forces with the Builder to unleash a malevolent new power.
Dying of poison and scrambling for help, Jack turns to an unlikely ally, her charismatic and drug-addled friend, Patrick. She must ask him to help with the impossible: kill the Builder. Whether or not they succeed may not matter because a new threat has joined the battle, an evil ferric bathed in blood, brimstone, and mystery.
Jack will never quit, no matter the odds, but deep down she worries: what if the cure is worse than the disease?
A good read with some good characters. Likeable story. I liked Jack and Lutin. 4*.

Jack was raised by her adoptive father, Cyrus. Cyrus had built a network of evil ones to work for the Builder as he feed on the ills in the world. Jack was trained to fight the Builder for Cyrus. Jack has a special gift — the ability to control those that she has killed (she brings back from death). She is joined by a group of ferrics who are the enemies of the Builder. Lutin is a ferric who gave her the gift of resurrection. As Jack and Lutin continue on their journey to the Builder, a strange illness circulates the world. Jack discovers she can do translocation. Jack and Lutin stop to see the Gaurdian who gives out “godsoul.” Godsoul is a miraculous healing substance. Strange events continue to happen causing Jack to have consequences that she can’t alway get the result she wanted.

In some ways, I thought of the COVID-19 in our present world. The ferrics reminded me of elves. However the ferrics are definitely different from elves. The novel is full of action. The characters seemed quite realistic. The novel has depth and some emotional reflection. I like the novel as it made me positive change is always possible especially when you don’t that. This is the end of the trilogy. I have not read the first two books but I will be. The author is someone who will be on my author list to check out his latest writings.

Sometimes, the sales blurb of a book is so good that I am drawn to reading it, neglecting some of the important information I should pay attention to, as is the case with “Peak.” I did not notice this was the third in a trilogy, and once I was over the initial surprise, I hoped it would not be too much of an issue.
Even though this is the last book in a trilogy, author L. C. Barlow did not feel the need to overwhelm readers with what had already gone before. A sentence here and there, inobtrusive, yet competently serving as gentle reminders of what had already passed were all we received, and it was enough.

I found myself caught up in the story, which I would categorize as an urban fantasy/horror tale. While the genre is not normally my first choice, Ms. Barlow has created an interesting premise and I initially found myself caught up in the story.

I say initially because about halfway through the story took an unexpected turn and slowed to a crawl, losing all its energy as it lumbered to an ending that caused me to feel that the author had painted herself into a corner and this was the only way out. The early promise of the book left, similar to the slow release of air from a leaking balloon.

For those who have followed this trilogy through the first two books, you will probably love this final chapter to the story of Jack. While this could be a standalone, coming in to the story at this point would put you way behind and I would recommend to start with the first book. Bottom line – talented author (so I would definitely give her another chance and read her next book), can be imaginative, with a good start that didn’t sustain all the way through. Three stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Rare bird Books for a complimentary electronic copy of this book.

Nothing about this series went the way I expected it to, and that is not a criticism.

After facing off with cult leaders and mercenaries, balanced on a knife's edge of cooperation with the race of immortal beings she is now a part of--Jack sets her sights on a final kill, the ancient being that has wrought so much pain and suffering around the world. As Jack mobilizes for one final fight, allies and enemies will rise and fall around her. With everything she knows and trusts being threatened, Jack faces one final, desperate struggle to achieve the peace she has sought for so long. But as the cost of victory begins to come due, she will have to face the consequences of her own actions and confront the unexpected damage that follows in her wake and threatens the future of all she has tried to protect.

With Peak Barlow takes the scope of Jack Harper's story to new heights while also bringing us full circle--concluding the story in much the same place it began. As the stakes get ever higher and everything Jack once trusted becomes threatened, Barlow weaves together the ties and threads that she has woven so effectively though the larger story. Peak does take on a more philosophical bend as Jack reckons with her place in the world and the larger forces that have always sought to shape her life, but through it all she has been so much--a weapon, an operative, and now an agent of dramatic change.

Everything rises or falls on Jack Harper, and as Peak reaches its dramatic climax, the conflict that has been building since the beginning will finally be decided. Horror and dark fantasy, coming-of-age story and an examination of good, evil, and self-determination--the Jack Harper trilogy is a bold and gripping story that reaches new heights with each installment. It began with a pivot, and now with Peak Barlow brings it all to a satisfying end.

As compared to the previous books in the trilogy , this book seems to be lacking the power packed story that the previous books delivered. It was a good read , but it falls a little below the expectations. The story is entertaining and Jack is amazing. The necromancer image is perfectly portrayed and controlled in a typical story fashion. We just can't separate necromancer and Jack seperately. They are one whole unit and once again jack does it , she saves the world ! If you haven't read the previous books in the series already , it would be more entertaining if they are read. This book would will get you hooked and the plot will not let you keep it aside.Barlow fans will be a bit disappointed , as the bar of expectations have been raised by the previous books in the series but on the whole it was a good read.

This was book 3 of the Jack Harper trilogy. The protagonist is a woman and diving into this book without having read the previous 2, was disorienting. But was able to figure out.

I like the plot building but the characters were flimsy and too distracted. There is talk of power and immortality but most of these powerful people would succumb easily. I loved the descriptions and the layout. However the overall intensity was missing. Maybe reading the previous books wpuld have helped.

When I chose this book on NetGalley, I failed to notice that it's the third in a series. With no idea of what happened in the first two books, I decided to read it anyway.

"When I resurrect people I can control them. I have a singular power—the power to control those I bring back."

From the first page, you're thrown right into the action. You follow Jack as she navigates through a world and enemies that think she's undeserving of her power to resurrect and control the dead, and they're doing everything they can to destroy her.

"It transformed me. The very first thing I resurrected was a rose. After that, a dog. After that, three girls Cyrus has poisoned."

Thankfully, much of what has happened to Jack that has turned her into who she has become is explained to Patrick, her saviour. Useful chapter to anyone who hasn't read the previous books!

However, I couldn’t get into it, so have DNFd it.

While I read the previous two installments in the Jack Harper trilogy and was excited for the conclusion, I found Peak to be a bit disappointing. While it is a trilogy, the three books each seem to have a different tone. Unfortunately, this one was not a fit for me.

While I enjoyed the mystery of the first novel and still enjoyed the action-focused sequel, parts of this one felt anticlimactic. The prose became repetitive, the action was sometimes confusing, and the plot felt devoid of tension. There was too much happening and too much teleporting around to the point that it felt a bit messy. The main plot of this novel also felt more like a side plot that got in the way of the story coming to a close.

That being said, I did enjoy the addition of Patrick as a POV & I also liked how previous characters returned. The way that Barlow recapped the story of the first and second novels within character dialogue was also nicely done. Jack remains an interesting character, but her journey in this novel feels like it has gone on a bit too long.

I will be interested to see what L.C. Barlow comes up with in the future, as she is clearly imaginative and surely has many more ideas up her sleeve. I am likely to give any further novels in this world a skip, but am certainly open to reading newer concepts from the author.

*I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Overall series rating- 3

Now, I really enjoyed the first two books in this series and was extraordinarily pleased to be given the chance to read the final novel...until I read it and felt a little less satisfied. Following the story of Jack and her push back against forces trying to control her through two books was brilliant, with some great writing that brought me into the world. This one though, felt a bit preachy, maybe too philosophical for my taste - where was the horror of the first novel? Instead, it felt like a sanitised version of what came before. If you've read the previous two novels (and since this is a trilogy why wouldn't you have), then this is a recommendation despite the way my review sounds. Just don't expect the same feeling you may have had when reading the first.

I have loved the series so much - but I must confess, about two-thirds of the way through I felt like this book should have been finished... This final installment got way more philosophical and preachy then the earlier two did, in a way that felt dissonant given the tone of the earlier books. I must confess I found myself slogging my way through the last third simply to see what the author was going to do. It felt less exciting and much more anticlimactic than I expected. And since this has always been described as a trilogy, I found the ending disappointingly open-ended - because I'm honestly not sure how much more of interest can happen in Jack's World, given the way everything came together in this book... As a result the ending felt unfinished rather than like leaving possibilities open for future installments, and it sat oddly with me...

It is wild to see how this all came together, considering how it all began. I would have never guessed after reading the first book that this is the direction the whole series would have taken. It's not to say I'm disappointed, just surprised - it felt like it started as horror and ended as religion, with journeys through several other genre along the way. I found the ride to be more uneven than I anticipated, and I'm not sure that it feels like the ending and the beginning really fit as coherently as one would expect from such a generally well written series...

I would like to thank California Coldblood Books and Rare Bird Books and NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC for free for an honest review. Jack and Patrick team up together to find a cure for the disease Alex let loose on the world and also to destroy the Builder. They have to kill it if they want to save the world. I read the first two books, so I had to read this one. By the time I was halfway through it, I just wanted to keep reading it so I’d be done with this story. Although there was a lot of action, none of it did anything to keep me interested. I felt like the author was tired of the story, too. Part of it was that I felt the story got a bit preachy in places. Another thing was too many characters that didn’t do a lot for the story, such as Margaret, Ven and half of Lutin’s brothers. And I guess they were meant to be different places, but Domum and Beretrum just read Heaven and Hell to me. The worst thing for me was that I couldn’t envision the Builder. It was a white creature, whose body looked like a plastic statue. The face was completely blank. It was just some white plastic thing without a face, which did nothing to frighten me.

I was a huge fan of the first two books Pivot and Perish in the Jack Harper Trilogy and although the concluding part has its moments, it is not a patch on its magnificent predecessors. If you have never heard of Jack Harper, I strongly suggest you click back and read the earlier reviews, as Peak is almost impossible to review without providing horrendous spoilers. Also, this final book will make less than zero sense unless you have read them in sequence. Both sequels pick up the action moments after the immediate conclusion, so it should be seen as one continuous story presented in three parts and set over a relatively short period of time. Considering where Pivot starts, with a fascinating inner look at the inner workings of a cult, Peak ends up in a wildly different place, which sadly lacks the earlier suspense and intrigue built, purposely edging into the realms of urban fantasy. However, if you have read part one and two then you might as well read the conclusion and come to your own decisions.

By way of recap, Pivot has a fascinating history, being originally self-published back in 2013 before a substantially rewritten version was picked up by Rare Bird Books some years later. The new version saw the much chunkier original sensibly halved into two much slicker parts; Pivot and Perish. The main character Jack is a member of a cult, but because she knows nothing of the rest of the world is completely unaware of the sinister organisation she belongs to. Jack has been adopted by the leader Cyrus Harper who teaches her a peculiar skill: that of assassination. Cyrus also has the ability to bring the people he kills back to life, so Jack, quite literally, has killed the same few people hundreds of times over a number of years. They do say practice makes perfect, with Jack being bred to be a pyschopath.

The million-dollar question revolves around how Cyrus Harper has the ability of bringing the dead back to life and this is a major plot strand in the high-quality sequel, Perish. A substantial part of the continuation takes place in New York with Jack struggling to before resorting to her (sort of) old killing ways. Before long she receives letters from children who remain imprisoned by the cult, for deeply unpleasant motives which were revealed in Pivot, taking the story into even wilder supernatural territory with ‘The Builder’, who becomes a major part of the events of book three. This middle book edges away from horror towards dark or urban fantasy with the introduction of supernatural creatures which were very reminiscent of creations which were a big deal in YA (specifically Paranormal Romance) a decade ago and I struggled to take them seriously. At this point the book began to lose momentum and as this is the major plot thrust in Peak my interest began to wane as it got progressively more fantasy driven and less horror.

In book one and two Jack was an outstanding character, she is presented almost as asexual, the product of her unique upbringing, and remains enigmatically difficult to get a handle on. She is undoubtedly a remorseless killer, but she does begin to show empathy and dominates the plots. However, she stalls somewhat in Peak and as she becomes more powerful, loses many of the factors which made her so engaging in the first place. Much of the story is action driven as she is thrown from crisis to crisis and there is not enough time for character development, which was a shame.

I also failed to find the central story particularly engaging which revolves around a fight to the death with ‘The Builder’ or at least a complex plot to outwit him. As villains go this guy was fairly dull, there was continual talk of him, but his appearances were fleeting and when he finally did appear, he failed to fire the imagination. All the quirkiness of the two previous novels disappears and we are presented with a standard ‘good versus evil’ storyline which is exactly like those YA novels I mentioned earlier which had teenage girls swooning. The problem is Jack was not exactly ‘good’ in the earlier entries in the series, nor was she a true hero, but circumstances lead to her becoming one of the most powerful beings (note, I did not say humans) in the world and goes to battle with those who gave Cyrus his power in the first place. Truth be told, I much preferred her a good old-fashioned psychopath!

Many of the characters from Pivot and Perish reappear, with some of the narrative being seen from Patrick her drug addicted friend’s, point of view as the balance between good and evil shifts, with Jack fighting to restore parity. Much of the story was a race against the clock, which got slightly repetitive, but the narrative is broken up slightly be giving us a point of view from her friend Patrick and the return of her truly evil brother Alex livened up proceedings.

As a conclusion one could argue that Jake Harper deserved better, but this final part is just not as engaging as its predecessors. Peak is by no means a bad book and I am sure there are fans of Pivot and Perish who will enjoy it more than I did, but I was hoping for a conclusion that gave us something more than ageless immortals battling it out on another plane of existence.

This was a spooky, SPOOKY conclusion to a good trilogy.

Peak is full of cold chills and death-defying thrills, Peak is a great wrap-up to the Jack Harper trilogy. Fans of the series will feel a good sense of ease (well, "ease").

Pick this trilogy up if you want a good thrill!

This felt like a good and natural conclusion to the Jack books as ever there was. She has come full circle in my my opinion, and while her fate gets even more fanciful, it was a good book and an enjoyable read. I look forward to see what comes from L. C. Barlow in the future.