Tuesday 2 October 2018

The Madness Underneath / Maureen Johnson

4 out of 5 stars
After her near-fatal run-in with the Jack the Ripper copycat, Rory Deveaux has been living in Bristol under the close watch of her parents. So when her therapist suddenly suggests she return to Wexford, Rory jumps at the chance to get back to her friends.

But Rory’s brush with the Ripper touched her more than she thought possible: she’s become a human terminus, with the power to eliminate ghosts on contact. She soon finds out that the Shades - the city’s secret ghost-fighting police - are responsible for her return. The Ripper may be gone, but now there is a string of new inexplicable deaths threatening London. Rory has evidence that the deaths are no coincidence. Something much more sinister is going on, and now she must convince the squad to listen to her before it’s too late.


I read this book to fill the Baker Street Irregulars square of my 2018 Halloween Bingo card.

I jumped at the chance to read this second book in the Shades of London series, having enjoyed the first book so much. Although I liked this one just a touch less than the first one, it was still an engaging read.

I think the reason that I found the first book so charming was Rory’s school routine and her friendships. The banter of this Southern girl with her British school mates really made that book into a special thing. That’s why I would rate this book probably at 3.75 stars, because Rory is away from school for most of the story—she’s trying to persuade her parents to let her go back to school, or she’s back at school and realizing that she’s too far behind to be able to finish with her cohort (and therefore skipping school to do her ghostly investigations). Her ghost-fighting police friends are great too, but Rory doesn’t have the same kinds of conversations with them.

This installment also gets much more serious and there is a bit of a cliffhanger at the end—I’ll have to go on to the third book to find out how things resolve for the Ghostbusters. Mind you, I was planning to do that anyway!

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