Paperback published ACE, September 2012. Third in a series.
Due to various circumstances this only arrived in my mailbox a few days before Christmas. I opened the padded envelope, and pounced on the book, reading it immediately and doing this review to file and run once I had time. Dream is the third in the Ghost Finders series about JC Chance, Melody Chambers, and Happy Jack Palmer, who provide one of the Carnaki Institute’s teams, which is sent out to investigate supernatural occurrences. As the author has done in the previous two books, the first section forms a separate adventure before they move on to the main event. In that first section an old portion of railway line and the railway station for it are being renovation by a club who intend to run steam engines there again. The strange disappearance of an entire train over a hundred years ago from that section of track appears to be causing reverberations in the present and JC, Melody, and Happy discover that some returns aren’t always happy.
In the main story which takes place immediately after the events of Bradleigh Halt, the team is called urgently to a disused theatre. Again it was intended to reopen the venue, and stage live plays, beginning with one written by a couple of middle-aged actors. However the workmen upgrading the theatre despite being very well paid have all downed tools and refused to return to work until the odd events there have been stopped.
The team arrived at the theatre , set up Melody’s ghost-investigating gear, and with the aid of the two actors, begin to explore what may be behind the odd phenomena. The theatre behind and below the main stage, is both very large and a complete rabbit warren. People, beings, ghosts, and strange sounds proliferate in corners. And the team is hard pressed to unravel what is behind the threats. There are a couple of subtexts that, while not hampering the main plot, continue to form sub-plots that carry through the three books to date and provide additional interest for the series reader. I enjoy almost all of Green’s series, (Deathstalker being the only one I didn’t like for personal reasons) and I recommend this series, as well as pretty much anything else that he’s written.