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Book three of Edinburgh Nights (The Library of the Dead; Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments) might be the best yet. Ropa is still pushing on in her unpaid internship for the Society of Sceptical Enquirers (or rather, its secretary, her patron, Sir Ian Callander), and at this book’s start, she finds herself at Dunvegan Castle on the Scottish Isle of Skye, assisting with the biennual conference. This should be low-level drudgery, but Callander is good about keeping Ropa handy; and anyway, events quickly take a turn for the unusual, necessitating Ropa’s special skills in solving mysteries. A prestigious Ethiopian magician comes to visit, a priceless ancient scroll (valued both as an antiquity and for the secrets it contains) is stolen, and a librarian – Ropa’s favorite, in fact – is murdered. And our young hero is on deck to save the day. But where she has some experience solving crimes and battling magicians, here at Dunvegan she might just be outclassed. Everybody on site except Ropa, it seems, is a professionally trained magician. Academia and the Society have turned out much less virtuous than she’d imagined. With the written advice of Niccolò Machiavelli running through her mind, Ropa decides she can trust no one. Even her heroes are suspects.

This might be the saddest in the series, as Ropa becomes disillusioned with the society and the Society she had been so keen to join. We continue to admire her for her own strong morals, even if standing on principle sometimes gets her in arguably unnecessary trouble. But her ideals are shaken as she finds out that the people she’d looked up to are fallible.

That said, it’s a great story, expertly paced and compelling, with characters we care about. And I was thinking this was a trilogy, but this book ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, and I’m glad to see there are four published books in the series with a fifth due in December! So I’m pleased to be hooked by Huchu’s singular and unforgettable young ghostalker-turned-investigator. Get on board.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: dystopia, librarians, mystery, speculative fiction |