A House of Ghosts by W. C. Ryan

Arcade Crimewise, 384 pages, $25.99 (c2019)

If you shook Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew up in a bag, you would get “A House of Ghosts.” It’s got the flavor of an old-time mystery. The two main characters are a plucky young woman and a dashing undercover agent. Of course.

Kate Cartwright grew up with lords and ladies in Great Britain, but she doesn’t live a life of leisure. Instead, her effort and brain power are applied to her job in the War Department. It is 1942, or thereabouts. She is dying for an assignment that’s more glamorous than her routine codebreaking. And so that’s what happens.

Kate’s parents’ good friends are Lord and Lady Highmount. During vacation times, the Highmounts hang out at a splendid pile called Blackwater Abbey, about a mile off the coast of England. There used to be an abbey and now there is a mansion plunked on top of where the abbey used to be. Now Kate and her parents have been invited to join the Highmounts for the winter solstice and to join in a séance.

Kate is hesitant to join such a gathering, apparently because there was a “disaster" — forever unrevealed — at the Abbey, and the less said, the better. But duty calls. Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, aka “C,” has ordered her to attend and see what she will see. What she will see will surely involve the ghostly comings and goings of the flickering afterlife of a good number of former living souls. Why? Because Kate can see ghosts, a talent she reluctantly will acknowledge sometimes. 

Accompanying Kate will be her former fiancé, Rolleston Miller-White, a staff officer at the War Department. He, too, will see what he will see. He has no ghostly talent, however. It is awkward because Kate and Rolleston quietly disengaged themselves not too long ago. You must carry on anyway, says “C.”

The picture is complicated further by the attendance of another mysterious War Office employee, “Robert Donovan.” He will play “Frank Donovan” (the name change seems the product of unfocused editing), injured and mustered-out military hero. (Neither Robert nor Frank nor Donovan is his real name, anyway.) More awkwardness ensues when Donovan turns out to have been Rolleston’s superior officer in the trenches but is now playing his valet. Furthermore, it eventually comes out that Donovan knew one of the Highmount sons and also Kate’s brother, Arthur, all presumed dead, killed by a horrible shelling that collapsed tunnels and spread mustard gas. There were very few survivors. Donovan is one of them, just by luck o’the Irish.

So why are Kate, Donovan, and Rolleston there on behalf of the War Department? There may be a traitorous spy celebrating the solstice on the remote island. Francis Highmount’s business is arming the British fighting forces with his deadly weapons. There may be plans afoot to steal information.

The Highmounts and the Cartwrights hope to contact their dead sons through Madame Feda and Count Orlov, the mediums who will launch the otherworldly connection.

There are other characters, including an invalided soldier whose trauma in the collapsed tunnel sparked his ability to see ghosts. Of course, Donovan knows him as well. (Author Ryan makes it feel as though it was a very small war and the participants kept tripping over each other.) There is a doctor who is attempting to help the invalid. There is a family of retainers (brother, sister, in-law) who take care of the abbey, island, and Highmount family. There may be mysterious others — ghostly or real — who are intent on murder or mayhem.

And lastly, there is a dread storm that strands everyone on the island. The better for the (maybe) murderer to have their way. And there you have the classic locked room mystery with red herrings a-plenty, that may or may not play fair, that will entertain, that will send ghostly shivers down your spine. (The ghostly stuff is pretty mild, so no worries that there will be a Jack Nicholson maniac trying to chop his way through a door.)

“The Ghost House” is very enjoyable. There is at least one dead body. There are secrets the mansion reluctantly gives up. There is an ossuary. There are bashful blushes.

So enjoy!