The Parlour Game: A Victorian Ghost Story

⭐⭐⭐⭐— Love the cover on this one!

My rating for this one depends on if there is going to be a sequel or not. If there is, then this was a strong 4 star read. Well written. Well paced. Atmospheric. Creepy. Mysterious. Strong characters. However, if this was a one off than I have to unfortunately knock off a star. The ending was rushed and confusing, and there were so many loose ends. What happened to the Jack The Ripper guy? The the vicar and his housekeeper? The weird old man at the jewelry shop? There is a ton left unexplained. So hopefully there will be a sequel! Author has confirmed a sequel!

ARC Via NetGalley

What a page-turner! When I started this gothic mystery I thought it was going to be a stand-alone. I really did not want to start another series. So often the stories are dragged out unnecessarily, leaving me annoyed at having my time wasted. I'm slow, so I was about halfway through before I realized this wasn't about to be all tidied up at the end. Ha! Instead, what we have here is a strong foundation for a supernatural ride through 19th century London and...Egypt? Maybe?

Ivy is our MC. She's meek. She's isolated. She's smart and determined and, despite all she's come to believe about herself, courageous beyond reason. After her mother dies, Ivy meets a mysterious woman who drops some heavy clues that her mother was more than she seemed. Ivy sets off to London from her country home to find out answers about who her mother really was. There are all the spooky themes one would expect in a gothic (soft) thriller. A book filled with more questions than answers paves the way for a potentially awesome series.

I read an ARC from NetGalley, so there were some unfinished aspects that I'm assuming will be cleaned up before the final is released at the end of the month. I noticed a hodgepodge of punctuation, spelling, and grammatical errors that I'm sure exist in most books before their final polish. I also noticed some continuity errors that were pretty glaring. I hope those were caught prior to printing. Nothing terrible—one moment someone has fainted and the next they're talking; another, it was 11:35 on one page and a number of pages later the clock is striking 11:00. So, not terrible, just distracting.

All told, I'd say this is a promising debut, and I look forward to reading the next in this series.