A Bridge Across the Ocean, by Susan Meissner. Berkeley, 2017

Brette Caslake can see ghosts- she calls them Drifters. This ability runs in her mother’s side of the family, and is creating a problem in her life- she is afraid to have a child, lest it be a girl who inherits the ability. She ignores the Drifters, frightened not of them but of being driven mad like a relative was. So she’s very unhappy when an old classmate calls out of the blue, asking her to use her ability to help him. His daughter, with her mother recently dead, thinks she has found the spirit of her mother. Will Brette go and see, and, hopefully, put the thought to rest?

Reluctantly, Brette agrees. The ghost is supposedly on the Queen Mary, the ship with a varied history: luxury liner; troop transport in WW 2; carrier of hundreds of European women who married Americans during the war and now need to get to America to reunite with their husband; stationary tourist attraction in Long Beach, CA. Brette goes, and discovers that the rumors are true; the ship really is haunted, by several spirits. The little girl’s mother, however, is not among them, but a nameless, formless spirit seizes on Brette and guides her to a plaque stating that a war bride committed suicide. The spirit conveys wordlessly that it wants Brette to investigate this.

There are two other story lines, of two of the war brides; they both take place during WW 2. Simone is a member of the French Resistance after her father and brother are murdered and she is brutalized. While in hiding, she cares for an American paratrooper who was shot. Katrine is British/Belgic, but is carrying a huge secret. Eventually, Simone and Katrine board the Queen Mary and share a room with Phoebe, the one person without a backstory. She serves mainly to draw out Simone and Katrine, and to lighten the mood- not everyone on board this ship has been treated as horribly as Simone and Katrine have been. As they cross the ocean, they share their stories, and Katrine’s secret comes out.

The ending, and also the identity of the spirit that Brette met on the QM, both surprised me. The story itself left something to be desired in my opinion, and I’m not sure what. I’m not horribly bothered by multiple story lines, as long as they aren’t easily confused with each other, and there was no doubting who each section was about. The sections on Katrine and Simone are heart rending. Brette did a good job of sleuthing to find out what happened on the QM, but her character wasn’t very vivid. I couldn’t quite care about her problems. Even Phoebe, who had no backstory, was a stronger character. You’d remember her if you met her; she’s the big cheerful Englishwoman with the child, a woman who wants everyone to be happy. The horror that Katrine and Simone went through keeps this book from being fluffy, even though the ghost whisperer angle skews it that way some. Three out of five stars. 

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The Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero. Doubleday, 2014

This book plays rather loosely with the definition of ‘novel’; composed of letters, journal entries, recording transcripts and receipts, it’s rather like ‘House of Leaves’, or, to go even further back and leave the horror genre, ‘Up the Down Staircase’. One might think that this would hamper engaging with the characters, and while it does that to a degree, by the end I found myself attached to the two main characters. A., a twenty-three year old European (English?) man has inherited- out of the blue from a relative he’d never heard of- Axton House, a manor, and its contents, in Virginia. He has come to take possession of this windfall; along with him is Niamh, a teenage girl with piercings, purple hair that is half shaved off, and who is mute. The relationship between them is not explained until the end, but they are not lovers.

The distant cousin, Ambrose Wells, has committed suicide on his 50^th birthday, which happened to be the 30^th anniversary of his father’s suicide. Both threw themselves out of a window, leaving a mess for the butler (now missing) to find. Wells’ lawyer, Glew (and what stick-to-itiveness he turns out to have!) Is there a curse? Are there ghosts? And what about this secret society that there are rumors of?

There are a lot of things going on, both human and paranormal. A. and Niamh seem to no sooner figure out one thing when another one comes up. There are a number of red herrings, and we don’t know until the end which ones those are. The climax was not at all what I expected. I enjoyed this book a LOT- I read it in late spring, but it would be even better read in winter, with a fire going and snow deadening sounds. I hope that Cantero writes more horror, and soon! Also, I love the cover art. I don’t know who did it, but it would make a great poster. 

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The Quick, by Lauren Owen. Random House 2014

 

In 1892 London, James Norbury has disappeared, much to his sister Charlotte’s concern. Heir to a small amount of money that allows him to live without working, he had taken rooms with Christopher Paige, an equally unemployed young man. When James vanishes, Charlotte rushes to London to see what has happened. It’s obvious that the young men did not leave on their intended trip. Where are they? And why, when Charlotte does find James, does he look different, act different, and tell her to stay away from him for her own good? Charlotte soon finds herself entangled with vampire hunters, a men’s club that is very particular about its members, an American whose vacation abroad has taken a bad turn, a group of very unusual children, and the deadly human who kills in service to the gentlemen’s club.

This book is written in the style of the 19^th century, and as such is slower of pace than most modern works; if I had just picked this book up with no information about it I could have almost believed that it was written back then. Don’t expect it to start off with a bang; the first section almost doesn’t need to be there and the second goes on for longer than necessary. Not to say those sections aren’t enjoyable; just, slow. The book is written from multiple points of view, including notebooks written by characters. This gave me a bit of trouble; there is not enough difference in styles and I sometimes found myself having to look back to remember who is writing at the time. And oddly, despite the length of time we spend with the characters, I didn’t feel they were well fleshed out and didn’t experience any real care for them, for good or bad. Do these things make the book bad? Not really. I enjoyed it; I love the descriptions of both high and low life in London of the time. Sometimes I enjoy taking the longer, slower route. I think anyone who enjoyed Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ or Kostova’s ‘The Historian’ will enjoy this book. 

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The Haunting of Maddy Clare, by Simone St. James. New American Library, 2012

In 1922 London, Sarah Piper is a poor temp worker, barely making ends meet. So when she is offered an assignment that requires going to a country village as assistant to Alistair Gellis, a ghost hunter, she sees no option other than to take it. Gellis seems harmless enough, even though his belief in ghosts makes him foolish in Piper’s eyes. Gellis’s regular assistant has been called away to attend a family illness.

The story they are presented with when they get to Waringstoke is that a servant girl, Maddy Clare, who had turned up years before one night, filthy, beaten and unable to talk and was taken in by the Clare’s, cared for, given their name, and made into a servant for light work, had committed suicide in the barn and was now haunting said barn. Mrs. Clare is frightened of her and wants her spirit gone. Much to Sarah’s shock, the ghost is very real, very angry and very powerful- and she hates men as much in death as she did in life.

What follows is a paranormal detective story, with Sarah, Gellis, and Gellis’s returned assistant, Matthew Ryder, trying to find out who Maddy was and how she had turned up on the Clare’s doorstep in the condition she was in. Someone is trying to discourage them from investigating, and a face from Alistair’s past has turned up in town.

In most ways, I loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. It’s a good mystery, and the mystery is blended with the paranormal well. I really liked Sarah Piper; she is strong and independent without being too modern for the time the story is set in. And while I liked Matthew for the most part, his relationship with Sarah starts out pretty creepily for my taste. The excuse is that Matthew (and Alistair, too) suffer from PTSD from the Great War, but that doesn’t it any more palatable when he enters Sarah’s room and has sex with her without having a word with her about it- and then telling her he won’t be back. Now, the sex *is* consensual, but he has no way of knowing how she feels; he just mounts her. Since he’s portrayed as a good, if damaged, person in the rest of the novel, one assumes (hopes) that he would have stopped if Sarah had said anything. 

 

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