Not sure when I bought this, I think it was for one of my work trips. Oops.

I had a week off and so between cleaning, caulking and entertaining cats I zoomed through this in pretty much two sittings. I definitely needed something a bit light hearted as my other book is 800 pages of very tiny print about the 30 Years War (1618-1648).

This was pretty light hearted, and a fun enough story to keep me engaged. Essentially we follow the Rook family, a quintet of Ghost Hunters, father, mother, daughter, son and his husband. They each have their own sort of power / ghost hunting skill that bring the to a tiny coastal town in the East Midlands, for what they think is a fairly standard haunting in a church but of course, that turns out not to be the case.

The story definitely races, rather than saunters, through the plot. And you know, I like plot, but even this seemed a bit ridiculous. It was one of those books where Everything Happens All The Time, and any mere mortal would be dead with exhaustion, but they just keep trying to deal with demons and ghosts and apparently a portal to hell.

The other thing that was a bit irksome (and also seemed improbable) was how catty the main characters were. The author was a fan of one liners, but snarky ones, which seemed like the family would not have lasted that long if that’s how they interacted all the time. There wasn’t a whole lot of dimension to all the characters and there wasn’t a huge amount of development for any of them, really. The revelations that also rock the family throughout the novel also seemed unreasonable, given the family business. I won’t it spoil it, but it seemed like the sort of things that a) the kids would have asked about b) the kids would have figured out because of basic math. But also it was fairly meaningless, sure the characters were a bit more fraught and catty, but ultimately everything still just happened and they stayed together to fight ghosts. Maybe it’ll be something important for the next one *shrug*.

But it was ridiculously easy to read and the story was fun enough, there were enough jokes and action that I was never actually bored. I might pick up the next one, as its sometimes nice to just have something that is ephemeral like that, when you want to read but don’t really want to try too hard.

Definitely a good holiday type book, easy to read and something to pass the time while lounging.