This is the follow up to Cold Calling which I finished about 2 weeks ago. Third time listening.
Who is stalking Seffi Callard, the world’s most fashionable celebrity medium, now a paranoid recluse at her father’s home in the Costwolds? Her old mentor, Marcus Bacton, editor of an ailing journal of the paranormal, sends his assistant, Grayle Underhill to find out – unaware that he’s thrusting them both into a nightmare… and the attentions of a vicious career-criminal for whom getting rich is less important than never getting dead.
I’m two weeks into listening to this at night. Yup. It takes me forever because I’m so knackered at the end of the day. And next night have to go back at least 10 chapters.
Mine own humble review of Mean Spirit :
The team from Cold Calling (minus Glaswegian Gobby Nursing Sister Andy Anderson – middle aged woman) is back together.
Grayle Underhill, the New York journalist, has decided to stay in St. Mary’s. Close to Marcus Bacton whose magazine The Phenomenologist is sinking fast and Grayle is helping to revive it as The Voice.
The gorgeous and cool Persephone Callard, of a black, late mother and a living upper-class white Sirship father, is a famous medium who has known Marcus since she was a child, attending the school where he once taught.
Cindy Mars-Lewis, South Wales Shaman and Cross-Dresser with his totem bird/puppet Kelvin Kite, is now on TV twice a week hosting The National Lottery.
The late, but revived by Sister Anderson policeman, Bobby Maiden is in line for promotion to Detective Chief Constable. Bobby had a very negative NDE (me too) and is still very wary of anything beyond the 3D.
Bring all these together with a famous TV hypnotist, a bloke who makes the Kray Brothers look like Nuns, an extremely bent high-ranking policeman forced (!) into retirement by Bobby and a huge “haunted house” once owned by a seriously deranged Victorian Spiritualist and things go somewhat awry.
Cindy is slammed by the public for taking the piss out of lottery winners who buy Barrett homes and BMW’s and “suddenly” all die. Marcus has a heart-attack. Grayle takes on a pseudonym after thinking that she’s killed a man and Seffi (Persephone) is haunted by a stinking, scarred, dead gangster who was once the best friend of reformed and now TV famous London Gangster.
I’m NOT a fan of Seffi. For me, she stands out as a cold and calculating madam who uses Marcus, Cindy, Grayle and Bobby without conscience or regret. All of whom then find themselves facing death by trying to help her.
Even the ending, and what happens to Seffi does not warm her one little bit.
We have no video for this post. All I can come up with is the one below.
Link?
Marcus Bacton is a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, but strangely loveable character who calls EVERYONE – apart from Persephone – by their last name.
Underhill. Maiden. Lewis. Anderson. Everyone else is just BASTARD :o)