It's been fascinating to see the 'InCryptid' series go through its most crucial phase. It took Seanan McGuire ten books to set the stage, introducing a sprawling Price-Healy family and telling stories from the perspectives of four of them. Then, in the eleventh, she wrote from a fifth perspective a story that she had wanted to tell first but decided that it should be built up to. That was easily my favourite book in the series that far, with the twelfth wrapping up loose ends then teasing where we'd go in the thirteenth book, which was everything.

It was told from a sixth perspective, that of Mary Dunlavy, former crossroads ghost and still the babysitter of choice for the entire Price-Healy family, even though she was dead before she even started three generations ago. It was frantic and busy, the war that was threatened back in book five, 'Chaos Choreography', finally kicking off and doing so on a grand scale everywhere at once. That was the magnum opus of the series, a juggling act of a novel with a bravado performance by McGuire. So, how to follow it?

Well, by staying with Mary but calming down to take stock. After a prologue seventy-five years in the past with Mary advocating for Bobby Cross's bargain with the crossroads and a fourteen-page recap to ground us, we kick off six months after 'Aftermarket Afterlife' when she returns from the dead for a second time, having been stuck at ground zero during the explosion at the Covenant of St. George's home base. Now she's back and has to visit the various family members in its various locations to say hi, explain why she was gone and that things should be back to normal.

Well, normal-ish. It's been relatively quiet in her absence, with characters recovering, the anima mundi is restoring and the war readjusting, but things are starting to warm up again. The anima mundi explains to Mary that the Covenant is capturing and destroying old ghosts, after realising one was involved in the successful attack against them, i.e. her. This is a problem that resonates a long way beyond the ghosts themselves and so Mary's now tasked with finding and stopping them.

The mission itself is fascinating, full of delicious classifications. Jonah is a homestead. Benedita is a midnight beauty. Agnes is a white lady. Martha is a house ghost. Aoi is a noppera-bo, or faceless ghost. If we don't know what all these ghosts are, we'll soon find out because this is patient like a teacher is patient, or indeed like a babysitter is patient. Mary serves as both in this novel and it's a sheer delight. 'Aftermarket Afterlife' was exactly right to be frantic, everything reactive and in the heat of the moment, while 'Installment Immortality' is exactly right to be patient, everything done by grouping and planning and preparing, not leaping in headlong because.

While Mary is being patient with us and with her mission, McGuire is being patient with how she's building the series. It's too early for us to see what the next magnum opus might involve, but the pieces are all in motion. Mary takes Arthur and Elsie with her on the mission, Elsie because she is eager to be away from Aeslin mice who won't treat her mother as dead (hey, others are dead and keep coming back, so why won't she?) and Arthur because he's crumbling away and wants to create some new memories that he can cling to. He's also firmly Arthur now because Artie was someone else, someone who's no longer around.

Olivia isn't the youngest family member any more or, at least, she won't be for long. Before Dom died in 'Aftermarket Afterlife', Verity was already pregnant and is now heavily so at eight months. Mary knows that it's a son because she can sense him already. We learn a lot more about Verity's current situation in the now traditional novella, a tradition continued over from DAW to Tor. She remains in New York, working as property manager for the dragons, while Olivia stays with family outside Portland. Brenna, a dragon wife, sends Melana to help her through her pregnancy. She's wonderful at smoothies, just not with ingredients we might expect, as she's a chupacabra.

Talking of the younger generation, there's quite a development at Alex and Shelby's in Ohio, one that feels like it's pointing towards future developments. Isaac can see inside people's heads and Arthur, to him, is a monster. That's not good and I have to assume that this will resonate. I already know that the next book, which is on the shelf waiting for next month, ties to Sarah's trial and I'm sure Arthur will play a big part in that. However, I'm going to throw out a guess that he'll continue to be important until something is done, if not to fix him then to mitigate him being this broken.

There's plenty with the anima mundi too, as it restructures Mary's responsibilities, which I'm also sure will grow as a plot element over time, and Apple and Mary face off during a meeting, which isn't as bad as it sounds because their trading of threats ends with help, but again this surely has to develop further in future books. The hint that the Covenant may be hurt far more than they've let on, to the degree of perhaps being destitute, is another pointer it would be careless to ignore as we move forward.

However, my favourite developments are with the mice, as they tend to be. The worst thing about this book is that we don't get a single HAIL! until sixty-three pages in, but there are perspectives, I believe, that don't see them as the most important part of this series. To be fair, they have little to do here because the majority of the book takes place away from family homes and there aren't any on the mission. That said, the scenes we get with them are outstanding. HAIL THE RETURN OF THE PHANTOM PRINCESS! There's so much depth in this weird relationship between a family and its mice and it continues to evolve. Plain Text Accounting is really trippy though!

Having written all this, it's clear that there's a lot here but it unfolds so patiently and effortlessly that it doesn't seem like it at the time. There's only one thing going on at any particular moment and whatever that is can be thought about and understood before any action has to be taken. It's not strictly that true once we get to Worcester, Massachusetts for the meat of the mission, with a bevy of fascinating new cryptid characters, many of them sharing a boarding house, including one clurichaun and one Hockomock Swamp Beastie.

So this is a beginning, almost as much as 'Discount Armageddon' was a beginning. Everything that went down in the first twelve books set up 'Aftermarket Afterlife' and this is the perfect recovery book from that. Unlike 'Backpacking Through Bedlam', which had a lot to do that didn't involve a new story, so that the new story felt a little skimpy when it showed up, everything here is entirely forward-looking and precisely as long as it needs to be. Sure, everyone's aware of what happened in the very recent past and a whole lot of characters are still mourning and recovering from that, but they're also preparing for the next stage.

We benefit from that too, having far more information than we did when we first met Verity Price, but the board we're picturing is a heck of a lot bigger and there are a heck of a lot more pieces on it. I'm eager to see what the next few moves will be and when we'll get to an endgame. This is the series that keeps on giving. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in thise series click here
For more titles by Seanan McGuire click here