Starred review from June 4, 2007
A
violent ghost in a world where spirits are rarely mean-spirited is a clue to a deeper mystery in this engrossing dark fantasy debut from comics-writer Carey. Felix “Fix” Castor is an itinerant exorcist who (like a certain famous group of Hollywood ghost-evicters) alternates between dispatching spooks and doing stage magic at ungrateful children's birthday parties. When he's summoned to end a haunting at London's prestigious Bonnington Archive, he finds a vengeful specter with a blood-veiled face that resists methods for extirpating the usually docile dead. When Castor begins probing more deeply, he quickly finds himself harassed by a ravenous succubus, a belligerent fellow exorcist and a slimy Eastern European pimp. The resolution of this ingeniously multilayered tale will satisfy fans of both fantasy and detective fiction. Fix Castor's wisecracking cleverness in the face of weird nemeses makes him the perfect hardboiled hero for a new supernatural noir series.
10-city author tour.
May 15, 2014
Freelance necromancer Felix (known as Fix) Castor sees dead people. In an alternate London dead people--zombies, ghouls, loup-garous and vampires--abound. Fix can bind them using his tin whistle. But when he binds a demon to his best friend, Fix's life is never the same. Now broke, he has to take on a new job, exorcising a ghost from an archive. The longer he works on the exorcism, the more he realizes he has to solve the murder that created this ghost. VERDICT Bleak, saturnine, and wry with shades of horror and dark urban fantasy thrown in, this series debut is a very noir mystery.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 17, 2007
Kramer easily creates the persona of the novel's narrator, Felix Castor. Castor is a practicing exorcist in London, where he is able to see the ghosts of a small number of British dead. Kramer, using a mild nasal tone with emphasis on vowels, plays Castor with a light British accent that establishes the character's humor, first demonstrated at a party. The exorcist and the dead are each credible, no small feat for Kramer as he wends a smooth path over the thickets of Carey's overlong plot. If his voice is less successful for the female characters and for some of the weird characters Castor must encounter, Kramer is still quite capable. Simultaneous release with the Grand Central hardcover (Reviews, June 4).