Rushing to the Conclusion: Ghostly Echoes

I came back to this series quicker than I normally would, because the second installment of the Jackaby series left off with some very interesting changes in the resident ghost's activity, and I wanted to see what the series would do with a trope that is very well-covered and traditional, compared to redcaps and some of the other crazy paranormal creatures that made their appearances in the first two books.

Unfortunately, there was too much going on here in Ghostly Echoes, and as much as I wanted the book to focus on the murder-mystery style task of discovering Jenny's killer and putting her to rest, we got thrown into a whole other set of otherworldly creatures and rules of the fae and the River Styx. It's not that these things weren't interesting, but once again they're in a jumble with other things, so there wasn't as much depth of detail, and in that way the narrative that could have been very tight quickly lost focus. There was also a missed opportunity to develop how the ghostly realm and the realm of the dead works here. There was an effort at that, with Abby's descent into the land of the dead, but it had very little to do with Jenny's temporal changes, and just felt too far afield, even for these novels.

I'm not as hyped up about finishing the series as I was to come to this title. So it might be quite a while before I pick up book number 4, if at all.

K Rating/ 2/5