Title: Skeleton Crew
Series: PsyCop: Book Fourteen
Author: Jordan Castillo Price
Publisher: JCP Books
Length: 302 Pages
Category: Urban Fantasy
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: Jordan Castillo Price continues to tap into her extensive imagination and uses it to its full advantage to pull readers back into the PsyCop world, book after book, with fresh new adventures. Or misadventures, whatever the case may lead to. In fact, the opposite is true: I can’t wait for each new release, and have yet to be disappointed.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Although Victor Bayne is a valued asset of the FPMP, he still vividly recalls his PsyCop days: the eye rolls, the nasty looks, and the occasional utterance of the words “Spook Squad” whenever he showed up on a scene. So he really should empathize with Howard Jibben, the weekend lab manager known as Heebie Jeebie.
But does the guy really need to be so darn annoying?
Thanks to the researcher’s OCD tendencies, when a mysterious shipment arrives, what should be a routine ghost-check turns into an excruciating ordeal…made even worse by a freak incident that leaves them stranded in the FPMP’s basement.
Jacob may be the ranking agent on site, but even he can’t control the weather. Yet given the pressure he puts on himself to master his newfound ability, it’s as if he thinks the burden to free everyone is his alone.
Vic has never put much stock in luck, but the sheer number of disasters raining down on them can’t possibly be pure chance—and things are only getting worse. Is it a curse? Telekinesis? Sabotage?
Or is there something more sinister lurking in the shadows?
Review: To put none too fine a point on it, there is always something more sinister lurking in Chicago’s shadows. Leave it to Agents Victor Bayne and Jacob Marks to find it. Or for it to find them, as the case may be. Skeleton Crew is as close to a locked-room thriller as this series has come yet—at least, in my recollection—but the claustrophobic atmosphere has absolutely nothing on the mounting evidence that the characters are confined underground with something that could conceivably become their eternal undoing. Jordan Castillo Price traps Vic, Jacob, and company multiple levels below earth, and then offers them up on a silver platter to something that forces a brilliant revelation this late in the game for the most powerful medium in the FPMP’s cache.
This being the fourteenth book in the PsyCop series, it’s impressive (but not really surprising) that Price still has a few tricks up her sleeve to avoid Vic and Jacob becoming mere accessories to the paranormal or simple fixtures of the urban fantasy setting. After more than a decade and a half of the paranormal keeping the agents on their proverbial toes, they’re still learning new things about themselves, and each other, without a single bit of it feeling repurposed or extraneous. JCP continues to tap into her extensive imagination and uses it to its full advantage to pull readers back into the PsyCop world, book after book, with fresh new adventures. Or misadventures, whatever the case may lead to. In fact, the opposite is true: I can’t wait for each new release, and have yet to be disappointed.
Vic and Jacob are steadfastly committed to each other, both on the job and off it, after all these years and everything they’ve gone through together. Revisiting them is like watching a couple of characters you love keep getting their happily ever after over and over and over again, and loving every word of it.
You can buy Skeleton Crew here:
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