Houses of the unholy

A teen held hostage in the trunk of a pot-smoking investigator's car kicks off the latest haunting noir from Brubaker and Phillips (the Reckless series). Natalie Burns's job entails removing indoctrinated kids from cults and returning them to their parents. She knows all too well how easy it is to believe lies--when she was a kid in the 1980s, she got caught up in the satanic panic and testified against her summer camp counselors. Having spent her life wrestling with vague memories of a predatory cult that she now believes to be false, Natalie is approached by a rogue FBI agent, who offers to get the criminal charges against her droppped (she kidnapped that last teen while using a fake ID) if she helps him dig into a series of murders involving her fellow accusers, known as the "Satanic Six." But when trauma rears its ugly head and an old friend turns up dead, even the people closest to Natalie may prove to be devils in disguise. Speckled with vibrant color, bold sequencing, and carefully crafted splash pages, this dive into the underbelly of the satanic panic moves at a rapid-fire pace while sticking to the atmospheric formula Brubaker and Phillips are known for. It's a spine-tingling addition to their oeuvre. (Aug.)

"Can you imagine doing something at age five that followed you around your entire life?" Natalie Burns can. In the summer of 1988, at the height of the satanic panic, she and five friends claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured in a demonic ritual conducted by a camp counselor who soon took his own life. Three decades later, Natalie bears the burden of wondering what could have possessed her to claim such abuse ever took place. Her near-constant intake of marijuana and her work as an investigator, specializing in rescuing children and teens from cult groups, help ease her conscience a little, but she still feels unworthy and incapable of redemption. When she's approached by an FBI agent investigating the brutal murders of three of her friends from camp, Natalie helps track down the surviving members of the group to figure out who's hunting them after all these years and whether their motivations might shed any new light on her own situation. VERDICT Brubaker and Phillips (Where the Body Was) continue to prove themselves as two of the very best creators to ever generate works of sequential storytelling in this haunting, knottily plotted hybrid of thriller and character study.