Kat Preston doesn’t believe in ghosts. Not because she’s never seen one, but because she saw one too many. Refusing to believe is the only way to protect herself from the ghost that tried to steal her life. Kat’s disbelief keeps her safe until her junior year at McTernan Academy, when a research project for an eccentric teacher takes her to a tiny, private island off the coast of Connecticut.
The site of a grisly mystery, the Isle of Acacia is no place for a girl who ignores ghosts, but the ghosts leave Kat little choice. Accompanied by her research partner, Evan Kingsley, she investigates the disappearance of Cassie Mallory and Sebastian Radcliffe on their wedding night in 1886. Evan’s scientific approach to everything leaves Kat on her own to confront a host of unbelievables: ancestral curses, powerful spells, and her strange connection to the ghosts that haunt Castle Creighton.
But that’s all before Kat’s yanked through a magic portal and Evan follows her. When the two of them awaken 129 years in the past with their souls trapped inside the bodies of two wedding guests, everything changes. Together, Kat and Evan race to stop the wedding-night murders and find a way back to their own time—and their own bodies—before their souls slip away forever.
Despite this very clearly being a paranormal book it felt a lot more like a crime mystery than a paranormal/horror. There are ghosts, quite a lot of them and they are central to the story but they feel more like just another character than something that goes bump in the night (most of the time anyway).
Part ghost story, part time travel (and an interesting way of doing so) part teenage angst the story romped along at a good pace. Kat was a likeable and interesting protagonist, I’m not entirely sure that her ‘ignore ghosts and they can’t see me’ was entirely believable but it worked within the story and that’s all that really matters.
The main focus of the story is on solving a 129 year old murder mystery which is intriguing in itself but with the added peril for Kat and her class partner Evan if they don’t solve it, the mystery took on a different pace.
This book has a bit of everything, ghosts, time travel, romance, a castle, a curse and a decent dollop of mystery. A fun, enjoyable read, I’ll be picking up book 2 at some point soon.
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