Rating: WARTY!
I made it only 50% through this because it just wasn't going anywhere and I grew tired of the flat characters, the bizarre changes in genre and the tedious story-telling. I kept hoping it would take off, but it never did and in the end I resented spending so much of my time on this when I could have been doing other things.
The main character is Addison - she's married to a guy named Luke Flynn and apparently has taken his last name, yet she's referred to frequently as 'Lockhart' rather than 'Flynn' which is weird, except it sort of makes sense given how short shrift her husband is shown here. He's hardly in it, contributes nothing when he is, and seems more like scenery than a character, as does Addison's child for that matter. I don't get the feeling that Addison is actually a married woman and a mother - not from reading the story. It's like we're told this of her, but nowhere is it really shown in the story-telling.
Addison supposedly has had this power to see and interact with the spirits of the deceased since childhood, but now she's a mature woman and she seems like she's only just beginning to deal with it, and is constantly surprised when it happens, which made little sense to me. What has she been doing all these years? Why hasn't she pursued it and learned more? Doesn't she feel bad for all the people she could have helped and yet failed to do so because she's completely incurious about her world? The author makes her look like a shallow and self-centered idiot.
Worse even than this though, was the fact that there was nothing mentioned in the book description about witchcraft, wizardry, or shapeshifting, yet at one point Addison, completely out of nowhere, transforms into an owl and gets into a house to visit this woman who lives there, and then accidentally changes back to herself - sans any clothes. This made zero sense to me because there had been not a whisper about any other powers until this point.
I understand that there have been three previous novels in this series - something I did not know to begin with. Though it offered a somewhat cryptic 'An Addison Lockhart Ghost Mystery' on the cover, there was nothing to indicate where this was in the series. Maybe there were such powers mentioned in earlier books, but there was nothing to indicate it here. The series has four books (as of this volume) and all of them have the same tedious title format: (insert pretentious name here) Manor Haunting. Yawn. I think it's bad manners to have so many haunted manors.
But seriously? Addison is presented very much as an amateur just dipping her toes into the supernatural world, yet she chants a few ridiculous rhyming words and suddenly she's an owl? I've never respected the sort of magic or witchcraft that has a rhyme that makes magic happen any more than I respected the Harry Potter nonsense that one or two words in Latin made magic happen. The short-sightedness in writers who take these simplistic approaches is disturbing, because it destroys their world.
I mean, if you have to use Latin to make magic happen, what does that mean? That magic began with the Roman empire? There was none before then, and no one else outside that world had magic or could do it because they'd never heard of Latin? Or that English rhymes make magic happen so no one who doesn't speak English can be a magician - and there was no magic before English was spoken? I'm sorry, but it's shallow, unimaginative bullshit, and not even fit for middle-grade stories let alone mature ones. Writers need to do better than that.
Addison showed how dumb she was in other ways too. For example, she demonstrates at one point that she can pull this young child who died in a car accident into her presence just by calling her name, yet the real mystery she's trying to solve involves a different girl whose name she also knows. What she doesn't know is the name of the guy who murdered her. So why not call that girl's name out and pull her into the sight and simply ask her who murdered her? Apparently Addison is far too stupid to think of that. This is why these witch detective stories are non-starters for me. If you have magic, you can solve any crime, period. Either that or your magic is garbage and not worth having if you can't simply whip-up a spell to identify the culprit. If you can do so, of course, then there's no mystery so you're beaten either way.
This leads to the same sorts of ridiculous and arbitrary excuses that bad writers make in time travel stories and movies: you can't go back and undo something that went wrong because there are "rules" that prevent you! LOL! They had a time-turner in Harry Potter for example, yet no one ever thought of going back to ambush Voldemort right before his reign of terror began? Another time-travel joke is that you can't let yourself be seen by yourself, yet in the same movie, Harry does indeed see himself and nothing bad happens. Another is that you can't go back over your own timeline because it will mess things up. Why? It's absurd. The same thing applies here in this story although there are no explicit rules laid down - just absurdities caused by poor and lazy writing and with very little forethought employed. I can't commend this shoddy work.
