Sadie Jones - The Uninvited Guests (2012)

The book begins in early 1900s rural England at a house named Sterne. The Torrington-Shift family are close to losing the house financially and are spending the day wallowing in the despair of oh-who-will-save-us whilst preparing for eldest daughter Emerald's birthday.

That evening, just before the party begins, there's a train accident on a nearby line and the survivors are re-routed to Sterne until the railway can bus them on their way. The family are a fairly self-involved lot and don't cope very well with having to do the right thing towards fellow human beings. Especially when the survivors bring with them someone from their mother's disreputable past who shows the family the cruelty hiding in their shallow selves.

The book was well-written, but not to my taste. I found the storyline and characters repugnant. I know that it is very easy for people to behave that badly as long as the majority are in agreement - it's how mobs turn into mass-murderers. But, I don't want to read about it. The synopsis made me believe it was a ghost story, which it is. A ghost story with a fairly severe look at how wicked and heartless humans can be.

Meg Cabot - Love you to Death (Mediator 1) (2000)

Susannah Simon is a mediator - she resolves issues for the dead and sends them on their way, sometimes a little forcefully with a bit of chicken's blood, some vanilla scented candles and a small exorcism.  No big!

All this was fine in New York, who'll notice the crazy amongst rushing millions? But, Suze's mother re-married and moved to California, the land of sun, surf and homicidal ghosts. Not to mention her lush new bedroom is already occupied - by a dead-cute boy.

Between a new high school, family and the undead Suze might just be in over her head.

This was an AWESOME book! I love Cabot's take on 'I see dead people'.  It's nice to see (mostly) ordinary ghosts who are just like when they were alive and generally need one thing resolved so they can move on. It's teenage fiction, so I didn't expect horror anyways, but Cabot brings a cheerfulness to the story that really draws you in and makes you happy.

Jonathan Stroud - The Screaming Staircase (2013)

Brilliant book! Very scary!

Stroud has come up with an interesting storyline - ghosts have become a major problem in England, but the only people who can see or hear them are children. So children with this gift (or curse) are trained to rid England of ghosts or become nightwatch-kids to protect entries to buildings - all very dangerous jobs.

It's quite horrifying that children are put in often fatal situations, protecting adults from the very things the adults should be protecting them from. This ghost-wormed England is quite topsy-turvy to our current day world and almost Victorian in its child-labour aspects. Stroud's characters face down situations that would make an adult run screaming - but these 'psychic investigator's' are resigned to their role in society. It's in their speech and actions, it distances them from ordinary people. They know the reality of what's out there and that it will probably kill them, whilst others get to live normal lives.

The whole concept was wonderful. I cannot wait for book two.

Laura Bickle - Sparks (2010)

This is book two in Bickle's Anya Kalinczyk series. Anya's a Lantern - she can communicate with ghosts and consume the nastier ghosts or demons that cannot be convinced to 'go towards the light' and stop tormenting the living. Anya is protected by her familiar, a cute and lovable magical salamander named Sparky, given to her by her mother and who, generally, stays in a torc around her neck... except when he's getting up to mischief and destroying any electrical equipment in his vicinity. Curiosity seems to be a salamander's besetting sin.

I found the beginning of the book a little confusing, it started too close to the way book one began. Different location, different person, same fire. This didn't last very long and I was fast drawn into an excellent storyline. We finally find out more about the fire when Anya was 12 years old, but it only brings up more questions about who her father is. Here's hoping all will be explained in book three!

Rosemary Clement-Moore - Spirit and Dust

This is the second book in the Goodnight series, a family with varied psychic abilities. The focus of the books are on Daisy Goodnight - she speaks to the dead. It sounds cliched, but it's not. This book and the first are fun and slightly unusual in the author's approach to dealing with ghosts.

My favourite parts were when Daisy spoke to her dead relatives - they're always so cheerful and encouraging. Not your usual ghosts. Daisy can also read a part of someones life from an object that was a large part of their life, but it only covers a certain period of time. Like a snapshot of you from 2000, but that snapshot doesn't know what you look like in 2020. It made it very interesting, like a spirit treasure hunt where you collect bits of a dead person until you reach the right piece which knows what you need to know.

In this book Daisy is coerced into hunting for a kidnapped girl. Daddy is a crime lord who won't take no for an answer and the ghosts aren't happy about whatever it is his daughter has gotten involved in, particularly since it's killing them all over again...

Katie Alender - From Bad to Cursed

This was a refreshing change from the usual attempts at paranormal by teen authors. No smooth sailing where the heroine always wins. The whole book is a roller-coaster ride of scariness. Even at the end I wasn't sure who had won, or if anyone had won - I was too anxious over the final horror! Ghosts! Is there anything that terrifies us more?

Alender writes a brilliant novel. This is her second in the Bad Girls Don't Die series. I had a lot of fun reading it and wondering and imagining and checking under my bed before I went to sleep. I'm really looking forward to reading the third book in the series.

If you like thrillingly scary novels, without the silly shock factor or re-used plots, this is the series to read. I thought book one was scary, but book two definitely wins the fright award. There's nothing scarier than not knowing you're kind-of-possessed.

Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Death (1992)

This is a nice rambling little mystery, part of a larger series which can be read out of order - something I did without any problems. I actually began the series reading Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter. No, there wasn't a real vampire in sight. These aren't those kind of books. Think of them as Devonshire tea books - fluffy scones with jam, cream and a good strong cup of tea. That's as far from a vampire as you can get.

The first book covers how two Americans, Lori Shepherd and Bill Willis, meet and how they end up living in a picturesque little cottage in a equally picturesque little village in England. It's all very idyllic with limited reality involved, but I don't look for reality when I read. I want to ESCAPE!

The mystery begins during World War 2 as the Americans land in England and a fighter plane, flown by a young Scottish lad, is shot down just off the English coast. Why does it matter in the 1990s? Because he had a young fiancee named Dimity, and she became a character in a series of stories to a little girl named Lori, told to her by her mother Beth. Sound confusing? It won't once you begin reading. It's a sweet little premise for a story. No hard edges and lots of pretty moments with many uniquely absurd characters - my favourite was Reginald, he's a pink stuffed bunny. Who cannot resist a pink bunny?!

Victoria Laurie - Ghouls Gone Wild (2010)

This is book four in a previously great series. I know I say that too often, but it's true. After the second book only a truly dedicated author keeps the character development consistent enough to bring it off. Otherwise you end up with a book that has all the same names as the previous books, but the characters have all new personalities and the relationships are dropped (as in, they were deeply in love in book three, but the start of book four gives a paragraph about how it has all fallen apart and therefore makes it okay for him/her to cheat - umm, not!) so you're all confused and disappointed and left feeling like you missed the end of the movie and will never be able to see it again. What kind of editor would okay this?

The book was still good. It was creepy and tense, but the baddie is blatantly obvious from the first chapter and you find yourself yelling at the book everytime the main characters do something stupidly illogical and utterly out-of-character - even disregarding things that have been pointedly told to them which would have solved the mystery a hundred pages ago. Also, the supporting characters reactions to blair-witch situations were overly blase. I think there were just too many characters in this book and not enough room to develop them. It would have been better to cut them out and deepen the actions of the main characters. Still, I loved the main character, M.J.'s, verbal attack and non-violent solution to the character who was terrorising animals. Perfect.

The main character is M.J Holliday, she's a medium who generally runs a ghostbusting business with her friend Gilley, but, unfortunately, finds herself filming a ghostly program with another medium, Heath, in the haunted wilds of Scotland. The plot was great. It alone made the book worth reading and put me off going to Scotland any time soon. So if you like ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump, screech and threaten-bloody-murder in the night try book one - What's A Ghoul To Do? And if you like the character Steven, M.J.'s boyfriend and investor in the business, give book four a miss and pretend they lived happily ever after at the end of book three.

Wendy Roberts - Dead And Kicking (2009)

I'm enjoying this series, even though I do not much like the personality of the main character - Sadie Novak, crime scene cleaner and ghost whisperer. It almost felt like there should be an exclamation point after that, but she really does leave me slightly underwhelmed. So no exclamation point for her. One for me, though!

Seriously - it's a fantastic series and this is the third book in. I really like the plot. It's mildly scary and definitely hard to pick the real baddies - rare for most crime books. I love the rabbit, Hairy - a very fitting name, and I liked Sadie much better in books one and two. She was less perfect, more frightened and uncertain, but still determined to do the right thing. Until book three - she's still frightened, but she's bordering on the kind of arrogant perfection that makes your teeth ache. I hope book four brings her back down-to-earth, so to speak, and returns her to her bumbling, anxious, less-than-perfect self. Honestly, a ghost is trying to kill you and you worry about eating a biscuit because you haven't jogged in a few days? Puh-leez! Focus girl!

So who is Sadie? She's a 30-something who can speak to ghosts and send them on their merry way to whatever afterlife awaits them. Unfortunately she often has to solve their murders before they'll leave - and Seattle seems to have a lot of murders. Which is how Sadie, the crime-scene cleaning lady (honestly was her name a coincidence or is the author a John Farnham fan?) tends to meet her often less-than-friendly ghosts.

How did she get this curse/gift? It's passed down through the family. When the current ghost whisperer dies a new one is called. It's like vampire slayers - only you often look like you're talking to and fighting yourself. Sadie's Uncle, who spent most of his life in an asylum, passed it to Sadie's brother Brian, who promptly killed himself, leaving Sadie reigning ghostbuster to dead Seattlites.

Honestly, try Book 1 - The Remains of the Dead, it won't disappoint.