After a storm knocks the clock face from Saint Dunstan's Church in Garver, Ohio, Lena Duvall, a sound archivist estranged from her hometown, returns to catalog the wreckage at the request of her dying mentor, Harold Sweeney. Joining her are Martin Petrov, the stoic cemetery sexton who never left, and Kit Alvarez, a restless courier and Lena's younger cousin who fled years ago after a fire no one talks about. In the shattered bell tower they uncover a locked iron coffer behind a rotted ladder rung, a biscuit tin of 8mm film reels, and a leather ledger stamped with the carillon maker's crest. The films, once threaded through Sweeney's wheezing projector, flicker with images of Founders Night, 1952: the congregation in paper crowns, Warden Alma Highsmith gripping a blood-smeared clapper, and a shape on the belfry floor wrapped in sailcloth while the bells toll thirteen, then a sudden splice. The ledger catalogs names and measures, but also a vow scrawled in rust-colored ink to keep the "thirteenth note" sealed. When the bells begin to ring at 3:13 a.m. without ropes, the tower breathes dust and winter into their lungs, and the streets below wake to footsteps no one makes. The three must decide whether to bolt the hatch and leave Garver to its silence, or pry at the secret the tower has swallowed for seventy years—and risk waking what listens.
Shadows in the Bell Tower tunes itself to silence and measurement: archivists, ledgers, names, and the moral arithmetic of what a town agrees not to say. The recurring idea of the sealed "thirteenth note" wants to interrogate collective guilt, but the motifs never resolve into harmony. When the tower "breathes dust and winter," the novel hints at cycles of inheritance and erasure, then backs away, leaving a persuasive chill without the moral clarity that would make it linger.
I went in hungry for rules and left with noise.
The setup is perfect: a clock face smashed out, reels in a biscuit tin, a ledger that swears to keep a note caged. Then the bells start ringing at 3:13 without ropes. Incredible image. And yet the book will not decide what its own bells mean.
Sometimes thirteen tolls are a code, sometimes a ghost, sometimes weather, sometimes an attitude. If you promise a "thirteenth note," give it boundaries. I kept waiting for the lore to lock into place like gears, and it never did.
Worse, the town's silence reads like convenience. Characters refuse to name the fire or the ritual not because it hurts, but because the plot needs fog. I can accept ambiguity; I cannot accept mush.
By the last sequence I was begging for a single, coherent consequence. The tower breathes, the streets wake, and still the story shrugs. I closed the book cold, and not in a good way.
Returning archivist Lena reads the town like a damaged tape, while Martin holds the ground with small, careful gestures and Kit keeps flaring like a match. Their triangle carries the story whenever the plot slows. Dialogue has a blunt, Midwestern cadence that sometimes turns to static, yet the estrangement between cousins pricks in the right places. I believed in their shared history even when the ledger and films took center stage. I wanted one more scene where they choose each other rather than the tower.
As a piece of craft, this leans hard on form: ledger excerpts, timestamps, and snowy acoustics. The archival conceit is neat, especially the wheezing projector and its 8mm stutter, and the prose loves consonants that click and drag like gears in a clock. The structure alternates present-day salvage with recovered fragments, trying to build a counterpoint.
But the rhythm rarely tightens. Chapters idle on the same image of 3:13 bells instead of compounding tension, and key revelations arrive as offstage hints. The result feels stitched rather than keyed, with atmosphere to spare and momentum that evaporates as soon as the tower opens its mouth.
Una tormenta, una iglesia y un secreto que suena a las 3:13; la novela sostiene un clima helado pero estira el misterio más de la cuenta.
