Ballad of the Bone Road by A.C. Wise

Book Review

Pauline Morgan

Perhaps the best way of describing Ballad of the Bone Road is supernatural noir. Port Astor, the setting for most of this book, is a city out of time. It hasn’t a particular era, but feels 1960s or 70s. There are no mobile phones or computers. It is a place where the fae used to live but have been gone for forty years, yet they have left traces.

            The principal characters are paranormal investigators with troubled pasts. Sydney Brix has an affinity for ghosts. They are drawn to him, and he helps them pass on their way, beginning their journey along the Bone Road, but when his wife dies, he couldn’t let her go. Every evening he summons her ghost and eats a solitary meal in her presence. Bellefeather shares her body with a demon. When she was a child, she was physically abused by her parents, who had decided she was possessed by a demon. Then it wasn’t true, but when she agreed to be the host for Belezial, she left the farm she had grown up on and made her way to Port Astor.

            The investigation starts when a former maid at the Peony Hotel comes to them for help. The hotel has a reputation for being the most haunted building in Port Astor and has been where the fae held court. The maid, Calliope, has been dismissed because she is convinced that a room in the hotel disappeared eight months earlier. The management declares she is mistaken and sacks her. She is sure that there is a cover-up.

            Eight months earlier, a young couple went into that room. When Leonie says that the person she would have loved to meet was Jimmy Valentine. Valentine was a singer and screen idol with a huge fanbase. He died in a car accident at a crossroads. Virgil says that they could summon him. That is when the room disappears and the ghost of Jimmy Valentine appears in it. When Brix and Belle arrive to investigate the missing room, they immediately know something is wrong.

             When Belle’s sister, Dee, arrives unexpectedly, upset and tearful because she believes her husband, Clarence has been unfaithful and made a young girl pregnant, Brix agrees to sort the problem of the Peony Hotel on his own while Belle’s goes to investigate Dee’s problem. At this point, they do not know that the two issues are connected. The connection is the Hollow Queen, the fae who wants to return to the human world and create mayhem. A deal between her and Valentine was the ultimate cause of his death. She is using Virgil’s misguided summoning to get a foothold in the world and simultaneously using Clarence’s faith (he is the local pastor) to provide him with what he thinks is a miracle. The Hollow Queen preys on the weaknesses of the characters to achieve her ends. She uses these to split up Brix and Belle and make their lives more difficult.            

This is a clever and dramatically plotted novel, and Brix and Bellefeather are characters I would willingly spend more time with.