It held all of the charms and whimsy that I love so much in MG horror, with the added bonus of Victoria Schwab’s gorgeous storytelling and characters. There's she meets a girl with the same gift as her and she figures that she has so much more to learn, especially when she realises the city of ghosts is more dangerous than she initialy thought.

It was one of my most anticipated releases of the year, to the point at which, when I received the eARC approval notification, I literally stopped everything I was doing to start reading this. I loved seeing these scary places though the eyes of Cassidy, and I can’t wait to see where the story goes next. Honestly, though, for some weird reason, I thought this was a story about a girl that can see ghosts (true) and her best friend, a ghost cat (totally not true). If you enjoy the intrigue of a murder mystery coupled with the historical horrors of hierarchical Stalinist Russia, you will find this book thought provoking and blood curdling with little respite even as the hero reveals his introspective longing for lost love. Trigger and content warnings for death, especially the death of children, murder, loss of a child, and abduction.Long ago, as a prisoner, Major Nikitin tortured him to confession by chopping off his fingers and breaking the others. The events of the book are set post war during Stalin’s reign and it certainly made me appreciate how lucky we are not to have lived in that place at that time.

His inquiries take him from Leningrad to Moscow and involve victims of the Soviet gulags to the highest offices in the land. Sadly once this was all done the story became almost something of a literary thriller, the authors seemed more interested in displaying their knowledge of the Soviet of the time and there was page after page of talk about opera and composing. There is nothing worse than reading a historical crime novel where accuracy has been sacrificed to plot.I really do think that this is a “it’s me, not you” scenario, so I’m really confident that other people will like it more! He went on to graduate from Southbank University in London with a 2:1 in politics and since then he has had various jobs in retail, cinema, and telesales and has kept a keen, almost obsessive, interest in current affairs. So why only four stars well whilst music plays a significant part of the story, and I am afraid quite a lot of the in depth musical explanations went straight over my head and bored me. In the dialogue between characters, there is a hesitation and procrastination, and a sense that no-one can be trusted with relationships, both professional and personal formed with this lingering mistrust.