The death of a colleague’s husband – albeit in name only – leads Minnie Ward from the Variety Palace Theatre and private investigator Albert Easterbrook to begin the hunt for a murderer. The trail soon(ish) leads them to a strange society of spiritualists, the Spirit Sisterhood, but this starts to push a wedge between Minnie and Albert.

When Minnie starts to see images of her dead friend Rose, Albert is convinced it must be a trick, although the only person who knew the necessary detail was apparently Albert himself. As he heads to Manchester on a different case, Minnie goes undercover at the Sisterhood’s sanctuary in a country house in Suffolk. But if the images of Rose are a trick, then someone in the Sisterhood knows who Minnie actually is. And the list of girls who have disappeared or died on the premises seems to be growing…

I spotted this one on NetGalley and it seemed intriguing. I didn’t realise that it was the third in a series – the Variety Palace Mysteries – and it did feel that I had missed out on some of the back story of Minnie and Albert’s relationship. I was never sure what parts of Minnie’s past were parts of the narrative from previous books and which were in place before they met. It gave me a slightly disjointed feel, but that soon quickly settled down as I became engrossed in the story.

The characters of Minnie and Albert were what pulled me in. While it took a while for the plot to kick in – the spiritualism only rears its head about 30% of the way in, despite the title giving it away – but I was keen to know where things were going.

Plot-wise, it’s a little strange. There is one humungous coincidence central to the plot and it is a whodunnit, it’s also a thriller more than anything else, with some sense of genuine peril. The villain of the piece is something of an evil genius character which still manages to work alongside the general unpleasantness of what is going on – let’s just say that Victorian England was definitely not a good place to be a woman.

All in all, an enjoyable read with a decent twist reveal at the death but I felt like I’d missed something by not reading the others – I literally have no idea who the character in the final scene was which did rather undercut it. So I’d recommend this one, but if you think it’s your sort of thing – strong characters, a look at the underbelly of Victorian London and a twisting plot with some genuine peril – then you might want to read the first two in the series, The Tumbling Girl and The Innocents, first.

The Spirit Guide is out tomorrow in paperback and ebook from Pushkin Vertigo. Many thanks for the ebook review copy.