By B. R. Myers

This is apparently the author’s first adult novel after a slew for young adults, and I have to admit that I’m not convinced it is fully aged up. Genevieve, the teenage protagonist, is very Feisty™ in a particularly young adult way (i.e. with all the common sense of a young adult). She is confident and sassy in situations that she would probably be better suited just observing or even fading into the background, and then acquiescent at times when she should really take a stand. She jumps to a number of fairly obviously wrong conclusions, which she then has to apologize for, which always makes me cringe.

All of that out of the way, the plot is a quite juicy gothic mystery surrounding the tragic death of a beautiful young heiress. Genevieve, raised as a scam medium under the tutelage of her mother, has been brought in to contact her spirit by two different men at cross purposes, one to set the other’s mind at ease, and the other to uncover a murderer. Once in the classic gothic sprawling estate of decaying wealth, she begins to experience strange occurrences that test her skepticism. I love a false medium/real ghost scenario!

While the writing continued to read juvenile to me, with a lot of the sort of repetition one offers to younger readers to make sure they are following along, the plot really did hold up all the way through. I was full of guesses but had no solid predictions of the final reveal, and felt it held up in a suitably melodramatic way.