by Rebecca Stott

Like any good mystery, Ghostwalk begins with a murder. Elizabeth Vogelsang, renowned Cambridge historian, is found drowned in the river behind her home, and in her hand she clutches a 300-year-old glass prism. Her son, Cameron, seeks the help of his ex-lover, Lydia, who attempts to parse the notes and fragments of Elizabeth’s unfinished masterwork.

But if you insist on boiling the story down to one hippie academic completing her dead mentor’s biography of Newton, then you do it a real disservice.

Despite its compact and elegant appearance, Ghostwalk is an astonishingly dense and dark piece of fiction that defies such a tidy synopsis. This tale asks difficult questions about the whisper-thin boundaries between magic and science; it demands that the reader form uncomfortable conclusions about the cycles of history—and how directly those old patterns intersect and interact with the modern world. This is not a book about dry post-graduate drama. It’s a story about the vengeful ghosts of wizards and madmen, and how far the limits of their power may extend.

Of course, Lydia doesn’t realize this right away. Her understanding and her personal peril slowly climb throughout weeks of library legwork, involvement with an elderly psychic, entanglement with a militant animal rights group, and a rekindled affair with Cameron that’s both ill-advised and distressingly credible. And how can she explain the results of her own investigation into Elizabeth’s death? No one would ever believe that the phantom of Isaac Newton—possibly the original mad scientist—is somehow connected with a series of suspicious contemporary deaths.

However, I do not mean to imply that Ghostwalk is a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride through the seedy, murderous underbelly of academia. It isn’t. It’s richly developed to the point of being slow in places, and there’s too much emphasis on the affair between Lydia and Cameron for my taste. I understand that their relationship is important to the unfolding plot, but somehow this intense, antagonistic liaison weighs down the mystery. It’s intriguing and convincing, the way Lydia fetishizes the relics and memories of their previous fling—but it’s depressing and somewhat less engaging to watch her tolerate the demanding, incomplete union into which she willingly leaps once again.

Regardless, the intrigue picks up by the middle of the book and the remaining half is a quick, tragic, relentlessly intelligent read. Even the excerpts from Elizabeth’s work-in-progress are winsome and light for all their historical detail, and the deeper down the rabbit hole Lydia goes, the more evident it becomes that these orphaned chapters are much more than filler. They’re necessary components, integral cogs in the complex supernatural tapestry.

Eventually, Lydia is forced to draw a line between tough-to-rationalize coincidence and outright conspiracy, but she must not do so at the cost of accuracy. By the final pages, she’s too deeply entrenched in the action to make even the smallest misstep—and this is a situation where drawing the wrong conclusions can be disastrous, even fatal for Lydia and those she loves.

Though sometimes a little bit wandering and excessively meticulous, all in all Ghostwalk is a real victory for intellectual fright fiction. The language is effortless and exquisite; the characters are authentic—and authentically flawed. There’s much to love here, and much to think about. With great skill and furious enthusiasm, Ghostwalk challenges readers to reconsider the things they know about the authority of technology, the relevance of mysticism, and how closely these things are related.