Narrated by Noah Michael Levine
Lately, I seem to have been drawn to stories with characters who are psychics, mediums and cops in some shape or form. I recently reviewed Z.A Maxfield’s The Long Way Home, featuring an ex-police officer who gained psychic abilities following a serious accident, and I’m working my way through Jordan Castillo Price’s excellent Psycop series, in which the main protagonist is a cop who is also a medium… so I suppose a title like P.S. I Spook You was bound to catch my eye. To tell the truth though, I actually picked it up because I’d recently enjoyed S.E. Harmon’s The Blueprint, and was keen to try another title by that author. I only really noticed the similarities between it and some of my other recent listens once I’d started it. Duh.
FBI profiler Rain Christiansen has spent the last few months in the dog-house and on medical leave after he tried to deliver a message from the spirit of a dead girl to her grieving parents. He can’t remember exactly when he started seeing ghosts, but he sees them all the time; he can’t control it and he doesn’t want it, and he’s tried to convince himself it’s something to do with anxiety… but he’s stuck with it. When he reports back for work, he’s told he won’t be rejoining the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit), because many of his colleagues are reluctant to continue working with him, and instead he’s told he’s going to work as a cold case specialist and is presented with a stack of files and requests for help from police departments around the country. The one that catches his eye concerns the disappearance of a young woman from his home town of Brickell Bay in Florida, and he decides to start there.
It probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the local detective sent to meet Rain at the airport is his ex-boyfriend, Daniel McKenna, with whom Rain had had a four-year relationship before he fled to DC some three years earlier. Right from the off, it’s clear that Danny is still harbouring some resentment about their break-up, but he tamps that down (mostly), grateful that at last, his boss’s requests for help from the FBI have been heeded.
Rain has chosen to help with the case of Amy Greene, a popular, high-achieving high school student who went missing after leaving her part-time job one evening five years earlier. Reading through the reports, Rain can tell that local law enforcement was inclined to believe that Amy was a runaway, but the fact she’s never touched any of her savings in all that time, and didn’t take many possessions with her indicates otherwise, and he’s determined to get to the bottom of things and at the very least, give her family some closure. As Rain and Danny re-open the case and start speaking to Amy’s friends and relatives, both of them realise that there are things that were missed in the first investigation, leads that weren’t pursued and things that just don’t add up.
Rain is being followed around by Ethan, the ghost of a chatty, snarky teenager who keeps asking Rain to help to bring Ethan’s parents closure. Given that his first attempt to deliver Ethan’s message resulted in a punch to the face, Rain isn’t going there again – but Ethan isn’t about to give up and decides to help Rain along a bit with the case in hopes it’ll change his mind.
I enjoyed a number of things about P.S. I Spook You, such as the humour and the excellent banter, Rain’s hippy family, Ethan’s snarkiness and the mystery plot itself, which is intriguing and satisfyingly twisty. But there were some big holes in the story that really bothered me. For instance, we’re never told how long Rain has been able to communicate with ghosts. He tells us “I can’t pinpoint when, exactly, I’d begun to see ghosts,” and indicates he’s been taking medication for anxiety since he was put on medical leave two months earlier, but doesn’t say if it’s been a regular thing for him (I couldn’t help comparing him to Victor Bayne in the PsyCop series who spends most of his life doped up to the eyeballs because it’s the only way he can get some peace from the ghosts who constantly surround him), and other than references to the case that almost got Rain fired from the FBI, there are no mentions of this ability earlier in his life. And Rain tells us he left Florida – and Danny – because “it seemed like the right thing to do when I saw ghosts every time I turned around. It seemed like the right thing to do when I was pretty sure I was losing my mind.” If Rain has always been able to see ghosts, was this the first time he’d felt that way? And if it’s a recent thing, how did it happen? I wanted to know! Then there’s the fact that Rain’s previous relationship with Danny isn’t fleshed out very well. They lived together for four years, yet I never felt a sense of shared history or connection between them; they might as well have been strangers starting a relationship from scratch. It’s hard to believe Danny would so quickly offer Rain the guest room in the house they used to share, or that, in the four years they were together, Danny never once mentioned his missing sister. And while Rain is the type that tends to think things through to the point of overthinking them, he does something incredibly dumb towards the end which is completely out of character.
Rain’s self-deprecating, snarky humour is nicely balanced by Danny’s no-nonsense practicality; they’re obviously not over each other, and although I didn’t really ‘feel’ their past relationship, they do have chemistry that leads to some nicely steamy moments. But if they’re to make a go of things this time round, they’ve got to learn to communicate and properly trust one another – even with the things they really don’t want to talk about. I liked them as characters, although Danny is somewhat underdeveloped – the story is told completely through Rain’s eyes, and I missed the second PoV.
Noah Michael Levine is a new-to-me narrator, but he’s a hugely experienced performer with over three hundred titles to his credit at Audible in a variety of genres. He’s very skilled, able to portray all the characters appropriately according to age and gender, and to differentiate between them effectively so there’s no overlap or confusion when there are more than two or three people speaking in any given scene. I particularly liked his portrayal of Danny, whose deeper pitch and slight southern drawl make him sound pretty sexy; and he does a good job when delivering Rain’s particular brand of snark, his voice containing just the right degree of deadpan humour. His female voices are good, too, a softening of tone and slight difference in pitch meaning that none of them cross the line into caricature.
P.S. I Spook You wasn’t a complete success, but it wasn’t a complete disaster either. It’s funny and smart, the mystery is interesting, and the characters are appealing, but the romance falls a little flat and the problems I mentioned earlier pulled me out of the story a few times. But it was fun, and might suit if you’re in the mood for well-written snark and banter, and don’t mind the plot holes.
Caz
Buy P.S. I Spook You by S.E. Harmon on Amazon
