THE TWISTED DEAD

In the third installment of her Gravekeeper series, Australian Coates raises the stakes for franchise heroine Keira beyond the management of pesky spirits.

Keira sees dead people, and she can talk to them. In fact, she prefers their company to that of Dane Crispin, the sole heir of the Crispin estate, who she’s convinced has invited her and her friends Zoe and Mason, a doctor-in-training, for dinner at his ancestral home in the town of Blighty, which his ancestor Mortimer Crispin founded, so that he can kill them all. To her surprise, Dane has quite a different agenda in mind: He needs her help. Driven to the point of madness by the vibes he picks up every day, he asks plaintively, “Are there restless spirits in my home?” There’s no one better equipped to take on the job of rousting the ghosts from his house than Keira, but she soon realizes that the spirits are tethered not to Dane’s home but to him personally. How is their attachment to him connected to the murder of Mason’s fellow medical student Evan Radecki, stabbed 18 times last year by someone who thought he was just too successful? Keira, who’d hoped to solve Dane’s problems by “fishing him out of a pot of ghost soup and letting him drain,” is alarmed to discover that she “can’t see a single normal ghost. Only shades,” as the evidence mounts that she’s dealing with something a lot more sinister, or at least more large-scale, than the haunting of a single unhappy heir.

Worried that someone may be using an army of the undead to take over the world? Coates has your number.