We’re on the home stretch of Bingo, and I needed something with a ghost. So when I saw that the protagonist of this book could talk to ghosts, I made the logical leap that the book probably featured ghosts, so off I went. Thanks to Tor for the ARC.
Unfortunately, a bingo square is probably the most I’m getting out of this. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it didn’t interest me enough that I want to read book 2.
Ropa is a ghost talker, who (since she dropped out of school) makes her living relaying messages from the deceased. Sometimes this involves finding out what is necessary to make a ghost stop haunting a place, sometimes it involves dealing with the classical “unfinished business,” sometimes it involves passing on a departed grandmother’s recipe for Battenberg. Ropa taking a job always involves her giving the ghost the legally required disclaimer about the fee-for-services, and it’s generally up to the recipient of the message to pay Ropa’s fee.
The plot is centered on one ghost who keeps pestering Ropa about her missing son, despite Ropa telling her repeatedly that she’s not delivering a message if no one is going to pay for it. I don’t consider it a spoiler that eventually Ropa does take the case on pro bono.
It’s a classic setup for a story (I firmly believe there’s no such thing as cliches, only boring authors), and Ropa is a lot of fun. She reminds me a lot of Teagan Frost from The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind by Jackson Ford, which is a good thing. She’s cynical, sarcastic, and takes absolutely no shit from anyone. She’s hugely devoted to her little sister and grandmother. All in all, she’s really easy to like.
Other points of interest in the story: ghosttalking is apparently a government licensed profession. Ropa at one point finds her way into Edinburgh’s secret Library of the Dead and starts learning magic. A few decades before the story, there was some kind of catastrophe that left Edinburgh as the capital of a greatly reduced Britain ruled by a true (and somewhat tyrannical) King, not just a figurehead. It’s not quite a dystopia, but it’s close. And there is set-up for an overarching story, only tangentially related to the missing kids mystery.
If that sounds like a lot of things filed under “other points of interest,” it’s because it is. This book suffers from a bad case of Worldbuilder’s Syndrome, which is my term for a book where the author had a bunch of cool ideas and couldn’t bear to leave them out. Many of the elements of this book could have been lifted straight out with no changes required to the story, and that’s something of a problem.
It is well-written, but a comparison to the early Dresden Files doesn’t seem inappropriate. If I hear a few books down the line that the series has found its feet I might pick it up again, but for the present I’m not going to worry about it.