GHOSTLORD

A spectral child’s appeal leads a London teen into webs of deceit and desperate choices.

In this stand-alone tale loosely linked to Wildlord (2022), Meg Lewis hears a disembodied voice crying for help in her spooky new village home. She gradually finds herself caught between the glittering promises of a smooth-talking, imprisoned mage named Jacobus and the inscrutable but dazzling Samdhya—otherworldly shape-shifters determined to maintain balance by keeping the magical and mundane worlds separate. Being as her father lies unconscious in a hospital bed, and her mother is generally absent for her new job, Meg has plenty of time to become ensnared in the mage’s scheme to break free and also to exploit her latent talent for traveling through the Crypta, an in-between shortcut to faraway places, while getting acquainted with Skander, a young local who turns out to be a decidedly unreliable ally. Though the author strings out developments and squeezes in tidy reunions and resolutions at the end, he rewards patient readers with properly atmospheric crows, magical keys, spectral ghosts, spooky rituals, an invisible castle, and similarly uncanny elements on the way to a suspenseful climax. Womack leaves his young protagonist with enticing magical abilities that could well come into play in future adventures. Most characters read white.

A slow-building, darkly eerie tale.