Name: The Screaming Staircase
ISBN: 9780857532022

Jonathan Stroud

Follows three young operatives of a Psychic Detection Agency as they battle an epidemic of ghosts in London

The Screaming Staircase

The Hissing Saint

When I saw this book at the bookstore I was a bit apprehensive. I have loved all of Stroud's books (the very excellent Bartimaeus series)but it had been a long time and I really didn't want to end up picking some really dumbed down Young Adult fiction. 

The book cover somehow did little to alleviate my suspicions but I chose to take a leap of faith and picked it up anyways. 

And boy was I floored!

If you are reading this review I am pretty sure you know that the premise of the book is a London beset by ghosts. In this alternate reality ghost hunters (read kids) are the new heroes and our protagonists Lockwood and Co are the newest kids (quite literally) on the block!

Stroud populates this Universe with Type I and II ghosts, Miasmas and Malaise's, Salt Bombs and Iron Filings and such other contraptions that serve to create a compelling story that has you completely hooked!

If you are looking for a compelling "cant put it down" read with a healthy dose of scares then this one is for you!

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

In a world that has been plagued by an epidemic of vengeful ghosts for fifty years, agencies sprang up throughout London and the surrounding countryside that specialize in dealing with the Problem, investigating hauntings, killing the undead, and removing the sources that keep the dead chained to the living. Since the discovery that only very young children can detect the Visitors and determine which level of danger they represent, the psychic investigations agencies hire adult supervisors, most often former child operatives themselves, to seek out talented children whose extraordinary powers of Sight, Touch, and/or Listening enable them to find, identify, and extinguish all sorts of wicked spirits. Lucy Carlyle is discovered early on as having agency-level Talent and at eight years old is eagerly sent off by her mother to work for a former wünderkind who has lost both his Talent and nerve. Lucy advances rapidly through the agent grades due to being able not only to see but also hear Visitors better than anyone else. Although her developing instincts, which are unusual and often fragmentary, result in saving the day more than once, in a series of dangerous miscalculations on a job at an old water mill Lucy finds herself the sole survivor of an investigation gone horribly wrong. Lucy's apprehensions on the job had been ignored, and she decides that she needs to strike out on her own in London and see whether she can trust her instincts or not.

Enter Lockwood & Co., the newest investigation agency in the city with a major difference: no adult supervisors. Unorthodox in structure, the agency consists of just two young men with decidedly eccentric taste in both spectres and means-to-an-end. Lockwood is a young man of former wealth and privilege with a maturity that belies his youth, and charisma and courage to spare. His stolid friend and business partner George is in charge of research and, in his spare time, enjoys experimenting on a captured spectre’s skull that he keeps in a ghost-jar. They are Lucy’s last and best hope for a position in the city. Concealing her shaky past and desperate to keep her burgeoning instincts to herself until she figures out whether they are to be listened to or ignored, Lucy manages to be hired and begins to find her place in Lockwood's operation. And while routine jobs with the agency help Lucy regain much of her confidence in her Listening abilities, as well as impressing Lockwood if not the disdainful George, Lucy’s entire career and confidence in herself is put to the test when she uncovers the Source of a brutally murdered young woman. This Source is the key to a chain of hauntings and deaths that will begin to answer Lucy’s questions about her abilities, as well as pushing the fledgling Lockwood & Co. to the brink of almost certain destruction.

The Screaming Staircase

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