Nope. Didn't enjoy this one at all.

This is a bit blah to be honest. The concept is great. Supernatural shenanigans involving the Romanovs; I mean what's not to like?

But it's all a bit flat. I would normally categorize Calder as 'too stupid to live', but seeing as he's already dead, it's a bit tricky.

Calder is a Fetch, a ghost who escorts souls from their "earthly shells" through the Death Door toward a waiting boat to Heaven. While each soul sees him differently, Calder knows himself to be a young man of 19 who died more than 300 years ago. Obsessed with a beautiful woman who tends a dying child, he breaks his sacred vows and enters the earthly world at a pivotal time and place: Russia, on the eve of revolution. Occupying the body of Rasputin, he enters into an intimate relationship with the imperial family, before and after their executions. As the action-filled plot, bound by the complex and sometimes confusing rules surrounding "Fetching," makes its twists and turns, Calder finds himself on a round-the-world journey with the embodied ghosts of Anastasia and Alexi, the hemophiliac tsarevich, in search of a key that will enable them to reunite with their family in Heaven. Meanwhile, the spirit of Rasputin and a host of malicious lost souls follow in hot pursuit.

I read Laura Whitcomb's A Certain Slant of Light for the 'Young Adult Horror' square in last year's bingo game. I enjoyed it and considered the sequel for this square. But I can't resist books set during the events of the Russian Revolution, so thought I'd give this one a punt instead.

YA Horror : A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb

"Their mother, in the wings, as often mothers and grandmothers are, ready to catch the children should they need saving, but otherwise invisible."

"I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with best intentions kill their daughters all the same."

Two ghosts, James and Helen, find themselves living in the bodies of two troubled teens. Billy, a recovering drug addict, and Jenny, a bright young girl rebelling against her ultra-religious parents. 

The concept is great, but the execution is a bit choppy. I'll probably pick up the sequel though. 

Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead.

Now that's just the kind of opening sentence to suck you into a book.