As this is the fifth book in the Lockwood & Co series, any description would necessarily give away series spoilers, and I don’t want to do that. Instead I’ll do my best to sing this book’s praises – and the series’ praises – to the world without any particular details. Heh. General series description: Alternate Britain where ghosts walk/kill, only seen by children but felt by adults, and where children thus act as agents who hunt and destroy ghosts. Lucy Carlisle, narrator, is an agent of Lockwood & Co, which runs independent of any adult supervision and tends to ruffle feathers of larger agencies and government task forces.

I pre-ordered the audio version of this book on Audible as soon as it became available, and downloaded it straightaway on Tuesday when it released. Most of Tuesday and a chunk of Wednesday was taken up by listening to the book. It was riveting, and not just because this is the fifth volume in a series I’ve loved for years. This volume was particularly riveting. It revealed a lot of secrets related to the world-building and history of this alternate version of Britain. The book’s tone took some particularly dark turns in places, and yet still stayed firmly in the middle-grade category. (Notably, I adore when books can do this – can pull off younger age audiences while still engaging older audiences!) The characters all experienced some major growth both emotionally and in maturity. Best of all, there were teasers that make me think there might be at least one more volume in the series. (Or more than one, I can hope!)

This is the sort of series that has so many hints and little embedded clues through each volume that you don’t see until much later down the road. In that way, it’s similar to Harry Potter (though not really similar in many other ways). I love being able to go back and reread earlier installments, catching things that looked entirely innocuous before. And of course, it’s the perfect series to read or listen to during RIP season.

Okay, so really, I’m not saying anything here. The lengths I go through to avoid spoilers, haha. Seriously, though, this is a series I highly recommend. It starts off great with The Screaming Staircase and just keeps getting better.

ETA: About a week after this book appeared, I received both good and bad news. The good news is that there might be a TV show made out of this series. Yay! The bad news is that this is the final installment. Boo!