Old Yellow Hand: Book Review

Old Yellow Hand: a review

A peasant's uprising in medieval Transylvania. The assassination of an evil old baron. A severed hand trapped for centuries in an urn. The death of an embalmer in a funeral home. Grisly murders in 1950s Virginia. These seemingly unrelated events turn on the death of the a oppressive baron and his hand severed after his murder. Once accidentally set free, acting as if with a will of its own, the grisly hand sets out to avenge the slaying of its former host. This story is about the wrath and vengeance of the mysterious killer known as Old Yellow Hand.
The story opens with the assassination of Baron Goran von Goranovich, a tyrannical aristocrat of medieval Transylvania. Disgusted with his inhumane rule, a mob made up of his vassals rose up against him. After murdering him, they lopped off his hand and impaled it on a sharp pole to show their fellow villagers the proof of their deed. They threw his body into the forest where wild animals devoured the remains. The village sage warned the assassins that everyone in the village would suffer a terrible curse if the hand were desecrated as had been the baron’s body. Hopefully to avoid the curse, the assassins preserved the hand in an urn of liquid used for embalming cadavers leaving only the baron's spectre to roam the castle.
Fast forward 200 years to a funeral home in Gore, Virginia. The urn is opened by an embalmer who becomes the first victim of the withered old hand when it is inadvertently released. Afterward murdering the embalmer, it sets out to wreak vengeance on all mankind for the heinous attack on its master. Another employee of the mortuary, a fellow Romanian named Mabad, vows to track down the murderer of his friend and countryman unaware of the nature of his quarry.
The hand goes on a rampage slaying victims first in the Virginia village of Gore, then atop nearby Great North Mountain, and finally in the college town of Briarwood. After a trail of gruesome murders the hand, following the baron's supernatural commands to return to its origins, manages to stow away in the backpack of Marissa Goran, a student at Briarwood College and a native of Goranovichy. Hidden amongst her clothing within her knapsack, it sneaks a ride back to Transylvania after the college is forced to close temporarily. The tenacious Mabad with the help of an investigative newspaper reporter manages to track the hand back to Baron Goranovich's deserted castle. There, Marissa joins Mabad and the reporter in their search. They enter the castle, face the baron's ghost and finally confront the killer hand in a life or death struggle.