Haunted Ground
Erin Hart

(Our guest reviewer this month is Perfect Books' own graphic designer extraordinaire, Catherine. Someday I may finally get the incredible bookmarks she designed for us printed! Thanks, Cate).

Haunted Ground is Erin Hart's first novel, and it is a masterpiece, a superb atmospheric mystery set in the countryside of Ireland. What finer way to celebrate Ireland's own special month and St. Patrick's Day too, than to feature this remarkable novel in March?

A farmer named Brendan McGann is cutting peat in the Irish countryside when he discovers the perfectly preserved head of a beautiful young Irish colleen with long red hair, there is no indication that a body was ever interred with the decapitated head. The forensic scientists of the Garda (Irish police) are unable to ascertain who the young woman is and how long she has been buried in the peat bog, and archaeologist Cormac Maguire, whose special area of academic expertise is bog bodies, is summoned to examine the grisly discovery and assist the police in their inquiries. Cormac is joined in his work by Nora Gavin, an American pathologist working in Dublin who also has an interest in bog bodies. Cormac names the dead woman cailín rua (red girl), and she swiftly becomes not just a bog body or an archaeological find, but a poignant symbol of mythic Ireland and present day Irish social problems, as well as a metaphor for Cormac and Nora's own troubled pasts.

As always with a first rate mystery novel, there is more than one thread being skilfully spun and woven in Haunted Ground. Two years before the novel begins, Mina Osborne, the wife of a local landowner named Hugh Osborne, vanished without a trace along with her young son Christopher Osborne. Hugh Osborne is still in mourning for his lost wife and son, but many of the villagers believe he murdered them for their life insurance policies. Others believe that the two simply became lost in the peat bogs and perished. As far apart as they seem to be at first glance, the fates of the cailín rua and Hugh Osborne's family are closely interwoven.

There are crimes old and new here, and Haunted Ground explores both, moving among tortured and sinister personalities, dark deeds and divergent centuries with ease and assurance. The many threads of which the book is composed are woven together in a truly masterful way, and it is difficult to believe that this is a first novel, so deft and lyrical is the author's weaving. Here is a rich, vibrant and compelling tale in which the characters are wonderfully drawn, and in which the verdant landscape of Ireland and Irish culture also have starring roles. Erin Hart has a deep love of all things Irish, and her rendering of the Irish landscape, village life and local personalities is impeccable. She describes aspects of Irish life such as traditional music and folklore, village pubs, farming and peat cutting in a clear voice and with a sure hand. Whether you are a devotee of Celtic archaeology, a student of Irish music and folklore, or a mystery junkie, this is a book to be read slowly and treasured.

The Smile of a Ghost
Phil Rickman

reviewed by Cate Kerr

This is the seventh Merrily Watkins "procedural" novel from Phil Rickman, and it is absolutely brilliant. No mean feat when one considers what a remarkable reading experience the first six novels in this series were. This book has a wealth of lore about the Welsh borders, a superb spooky setting, a brooding atmosphere, a fine ripping mystery, a menacing supernatural presence and a splendid cast of characters who are eccentric, angry, sometimes Goth, and occasionally demented.

"The Smile of a Ghost " takes place in the historic town of Ludlow, and the novel opens with two events: the retirement of Merrily's old friend Police Sergeant Andy Mumford, and the first death by falling: that of Mumford's young nephew from the tower of a ruined local castle which is reputed to be haunted. The newly retired Mumford is definitely angry and at loose ends - he has been forcibly retired from the police force while his wife is still employed at a local hospital, his relationships with his father and his poisonous younger sister are strained to the breaking point, and his mother is sliding into senile dementia and insists that she is seeing her dead grandson in mirrors and shop windows in town.

Mumford cannot investigate his nephew's death in any official capacity, but he senses something is very wrong and investigates anyway, but not before discussing the matter with his old friend the Rev. Merrily Watkins, deliverance consultant (exorcist) for the Anglican Diocese of Hereford. Shortly after Andy Mumford consults Merrily, his distraught mother dies by drowning and there is a second death by falling from the tower of Ludlow Castle. The Rev. Merrily Watkins already has problems of her own: a female Anglican priest with a hidden political agenda and a well known retired society psychiatrist have attached themselves to the diocesan Deliverance apparatus and are hell bent on dismantling Merrily's deliverance practice, each for their own sordid reasons.

Over everything hangs the tormented (and perhaps malevolent) presence of a medieval lady who killed her lover, then leaped to her own death from the battlements of Ludlow Castle. The ghost is well known to the good people of Ludlow, and Merrily's own bishop, Bernie Dunmore, encountered the unhappy shade as a young man - he was terrified by his experience and has never forgotten it.

The characters from the first six Merrily Watkins books are all here (although Gomer Parry's appearance is brief), and there are some splendid additions to the cast of characters this time around: Belladonna, a retired Goth rock singer with a lot of money, a bizarre lifestyle and an unhealthy obsession with death; George Lackland who is the harassed (by Belladonna) mayor of Ludlow; Jon Scole, oily purveyor of Ludlow ghost walks; the meddling female Anglican priest and retired psychiatrist who are making Merrily's life miserable.

This is a mystery in the old style: primal, chilling, and frightening; and the book has it all - suicide, murder, haunting, deceit, fear, obsession and dementia. Phil's settings are so perfectly drawn that we feel we know the town of Ludlow intimately, and his characters are so real that they step right off the pages of the book and into our own lives. There is a strong supernatural presence in this book and one which is truly terrifying, but that presence is rendered in terms both lean and spare without resorting to artifice, unnecessary refinement or extraneous mumbo jumbo.

"The Smile of a Ghost" scared me silly and I loved every word of the book. Well done, Phil! Now I am going to go back and read the first six Merrily Watkins novels again, and - lucky me - I have them all in hardcover.

Haunted
Chuck Palahniuk

reviewed by Neil Walsh

This novel is just the kind of twisted, humorous, filthy-minded brutal satire we've come to expect from Palahniuk. It's a story about stories and storytelling, being the account of a writers' retreat gone wrong. This time the author makes even more direct assaults on modern American lifestyles, including the current obsession with "reality TV" and the concept of the new and improved American dream, which seems to involve a get-rich-quick scheme in which you sell your story of pain and woe. And if you grow tired of waiting for some pain and woe to come along, maybe you can create your own. Or someone else's. Or both.

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