Seanan McGuire’s latest InCryptid tale returns the ghost babysitter, Mary, to the Price family six months after she had been blown to bits. Her latest assignment for the Anima Mundi is to stop Covenant agents who are trapping ghosts in the Boston area. Along for the ride are Elsie and Arthur still mourning the death of their mother. Lots of fun ghosts pop up to help.This is a problem of Installment Immortality(paper from Tor). These tales are always great and I was happy for another adventure with Mary.

Installment Immortality is the 14th book in one of my absolute favorite series, but it is definitely more of a continuation of the series as a whole and wouldn't be enjoyable, I don't think, on its own without any of the previous books being read. In fact, it really felt like a long chapter in an even longer book, although there is a somewhat satisfying ending to the story it contains. The REAL gem is the sneak peek of a bit more Verity at the very end; Seanan is definitely known to throw in a preview and she did not disappoint! Installment Immortality was dark with some favorite characters' arcs still spiraling down or presumably ending altogether.

Installment Immortality is the latest InCryptid novel, once again told from the POV of Mary Dunlavy, the Price family’s ghostly babysitter. While the last book was one only Mary could tell because the story needed someone who could jump across the country instantaneously, this one is hers because it delves deeper into the series’ lore about ghosts. I feel like this is information that has been gone into more in the side series about Rose Marshall than in the main series. We also spend a lot of time with Elsie, who is a character we haven’t seen as much of in previous books, and Arthur, who is literally not the same person since the last time he featured heavily in one of these novels. The novel also gives time to show a little more of the relationship between Mary and her “kids” of various ages. A solid 4.5-star installment in the series, and I’m very curious to see who our next POV is.

Representation: LGBTQ+ characters, POC characters

CW: Grief

Ghostly Mary has resume red her caretaker duties when she is asked to help stop the Covenant from torturing ghosts in Massachusetts. ARC. Bonus novella too.

Installment Immortality is the 14th installment in author Seanan McGuire's InCrypid series. You should definitely read Aftermarket Afterlife before jumping into this story. Events in Aftermarket have caused a huge turmoil in the family, and what happens is a cause-and-effect of that turmoil. This installment shifts the spotlight back to Mary Dunlavy, the ghostly babysitter who’s been haunting the Price-Healy clan for four generations. If you’ve followed the series this far, you know McGuire excels at juggling humor, heart, and high stakes—and this book is no exception.

The plot picks up after the emotional gut-punch of Aftermarket Afterlife, where the destruction of the Crossroads left Mary untethered and the Price-Healy family reeling from the loss. Now, Mary’s got a new gig: working for the anima mundi, Earth’s living soul, with a mission to stop Covenant of St. George agents from imprisoning America’s ghosts along the East Coast. She’s not alone on this spectral road trip—she’s joined by Elsie and Arthur Harrington, both grappling with their mother’s death in their own messy, human ways.

What unfolds is a tale of grief, ghostly vengeance, and the kind of chaotic camaraderie that defines the InCryptid universe. Elsie and Arthur bring their own flavors of dysfunction—Elsie’s thirst for revenge against the Covenant is palpable, while Arthur’s slow unraveling adds a poignant edge. The ghosts they encounter along the way are a highlight, each a unique reflection of how identity lingers after death, from spectral librarians to vengeful spirits with unfinished business.

At the end of the book, the author has left a short novella called Mourner's Waltz featuring a very pregnant Verity who is living in Manhattan thanks to the good graces of the Dragons. Also, the author spends a whole lot of time summarizing events going back to Mary's time as a 16-year-old babysitter who had the misfortune of dying and then working for the Crossroads. She, unlike Rose, hasn't been given a raise, as it were, so she is still considered to be the Price-Harrington family babysitter. I believe it is time for Sarah and Arthur to find time to reconcile what happened to him and to see if there's any hope of him going forward. One could honestly call this book a loose ends tie-up a book since that is what it does while making the Covenant the boogeyman that once again needed to be crushed.

There's nothing like a ghost nanny who can walk through walls and appear whenever she's called, and Mary has been caring for her family this way for decades. But it's not as strange when the same family also helps the dragons, boogeymen, and gorgons of the world coexist peacefully among humans. Mary is no longer a crossroads ghost, but she still finds herself tasked with stopping the Covenant of St George from capturing her fellow ghosts and turning them into jars of dangerous spirit rage. Enlisting the help of two of her adult charges, who are both in mourning and dealing with their own trauma, they attempt to free some ghosts and stop what's left of the Covenant.

I enjoy every book in the Incryptid series that follows this large and complex family, and this was no exception. It was so fun to follow Mary, the ghost babysitter of the Price/Healey family. Her sense of humor is great. I thought the variety of ghosts we were introduced to was interesting and so diverse. The pacing was great overall, although the beginning has quite a bit of recap. But with this being the 14th book in the series, it's nice to get a review on what has happened and who every character is. That being said, I would still recommend starting the series at the beginning, it is not easy to just jump in at this point! Installment Immortality is really tying up a lot of loose ends that happened in the previous book. Besides the check-ins with the family in the beginning, there wasn't as much of the extended family or Aeslin mice (although one of my favorite scenes did involve the mice speaking plainly). It is nice to focus on Elsie and Arthur and deep dive into their big emotions. Elsie works through her grief a bit with Mary while Arthur attempts to figure out how he fits into the family now. I really enjoyed the included novella where we get to check in with Verity at the end, and could definitely relate to her being heavily pregnant. Also, ghost dogs are something I didn't know I could love so much.

I definitely recommend this book (and really, this series) to all who enjoy urban cryptozoology, a witty sense of humor from most characters, and plotlines that are well done and never predictable. I love to read anything Seanan McGuire writes, and am already looking forward to what comes next. I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley for my opinions.

4.5 rounded up

Book 14 in the InCryptid series is dealing with the fallout of the last book with a 6 month time lapse. Mary has been gone, and things have been happening without her. The Covenant continues to create problems from the Cryptid Community and the Price family and Mary is called upon by the anima mundi to fix it. We gain Elsie and Arthur for this adventure which are a different branch of their family than we've been following previously.

I didn't love this one as much as the previous installment and at times Mary came off as too cocky and got herself into trouble more often than not. Luckily for her she's pretty good at getting out of said trouble, probably from working for the Crossroads for so long.

The ending of this one wrapped up almost too nicely compared to the absolute mess the last book ended with and I felt like I was missing something. The novella included at the end gave my flash backs to my own pregnancy and how miserable you feel in the third trimester. Ugh. I'm interested to see if we continue on with Mary, if we'll end up with Elsie and Arthur again, or back to Verity where it all began.

Mary the babysitter takes a road trip.
Ties the Rose Marshall Ghost/crossroads books and Incryptid series. Fans of either should enjoy this. Opens with 50 pages of origin stories and previous book summaries. Then the Anima Mundi asks her to stop the Covenant from killing ghosts. The plot flounders as we recap with each new person, but the detail is wonderful and the mice amusing.
After the first 150 pages, it picks up dramatically.
Unfortunately, the heroes do no planning, so things get messy.
The last 57 pages are a novella about Verity dealing with grief. Family members don't die often in this series, so it's interesting to see how everyone deals with it.

Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Secondary Character(s), Ace/Aro Secondary Character(s).

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book.

Another excellent entry in a great series, INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY shows the shape of what an afterlife can be, exploring grief and moving on, lingering in the messiness of mourning.

INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY picks up several months after the Price-Healy's attack on the xenophobic Covenant of St. George. Now with recent deaths on both sides, the Covenant has intensified their efforts to hunt down and destroy cryptids in North America, justifying their accelerationism by holding up their dead as martyrs to the cause. The Price-Healy's are in shock that Jane and Mary are really gone, and even Mary's reappearance isn't enough to shake them out of their stupor. Mary, for her part, finds herself under the purview of the Anima Mundi instead of the Crossroads, and is ready to negotiate whatever terms will let her keep watching over her family.

As a sequel, INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY is the second book narrated by Mary Dunlavy -- babysitting ghost and one-time employee of the crossroads. The Incryptid series swaps out narrators fairly frequently, but the events of the last book were so traumatic that only someone already dead would be able to focus and react to the next phase of the crisis. Even then, Mary finds out that she's been gone for several months, having sort of been exploded at the end of AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE. The Anima Mundi gives her a chance to keep some of the powers the Crossroads used to grant her, abilities she'd relied on to watch over the geographically dispersed Price-Healy's. Elsie, daughter of Jane, wants revenge against the Covenant for killing her mother, and she joins Mary for the cross-country journey.

Mary finally takes the time to dig into something that has been true for a while, but that the other characters either hadn't taken the time to examine or weren't ready to accept: Artie is dead. He never came back from being transported to another dimension with Sarah. There is a consciousness (Arthur) walking around in his body, but Artie is gone and there's no way to get him back. Even if some solution could be found to restore Artie, there doesn't seem to be one that could preserve both Artie and Arthur. Arthur is a collection of other people's memories of a person he's never been, and he's slowly losing his cobbled-together self because there's no core to hold him together. Traveling with Mary and Elsie to fight the Covenant is his chance to do something as Arthur that's all his own.

I love the focus on ghosts, and the way Mary's perspective changes the way that information is conveyed. Though she's traveling with Arthur and Elsie, she spends a lot of time at the destination with the local ghosts, getting an idea of the spectral perspective on the Covenant's actions. The types of ghosts are shaped by sapient (usually human) concepts of identity and what was important to them in life, but that also means the various types of ghosts are ways of understanding how people have manifested in their afterlives, it is not a set menu of options. INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY makes this descriptive nature more obvious as Mary finds out how other ghosts are spending their afterlives, as she is much freer to travel than most.

This isn't entirely a new storyline, as the exciting incidents happened in previous books and things have been built towards this for a while, but the shape of the particular problem is new, and I like how it turns out. Several major things are introduced then, at least a few of them are resolved. As this is not the end of the series, it leaves some things to be handled later, including, but not limited to a new generation of Price children. Mary's view of events is very different from any previous narrators, partly due to her position as someone who haunts a living family as a babysitting ghost. She's tied to the youngest of each generation but never stops thinking of even the adults as people she wants to protect.

I don't think the series would make much sense to anyone who tried to jump in here as their introduction to Incryptid. INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY is very much a book of what comes next, dealing with consequences for things that have been building throughout the series. AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE is a much better choice for those who don't want to go back too far but are interested in the series. For a little more background, SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL (#11) for TRICKS FOR FREE (#7) would be good options for a midway start, given how important Alice and Annie are to AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE, which is itself foundational to INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY. If you like long series, consider going all the way back to the start of the Incryptid with DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON.

If you like this you may like:

Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire

Graphic/Explicit CW for grief, blood, gore, violence, body horror, death.

Moderate CW for cursing, sexism, pregnancy, injury detail, torture, parental death.

Minor CW for cancer.

Definitely don’t start here if you haven’t read the rest! If you haven’t read this series it does start out kind of light and darkly humorous. The chapter headings in earlier books are hilarious. But things have gotten kind of dark…. The main character of this book is a ghost after all so it does kind of fit. There are a few scenes in here where you’ll remember the author also writes horror. Great world building and character arcs though so I’m happy to keep reading! I just hope the next one is a little lighter…. I might’ve gotten something in my eye for a scene in here,

Do you enjoy really long series? I’ve got a few I really enjoy, although they all seem to be urban fantasy; Dresden Files, October Daye, Alex Verus, etc. And of course, the InCryptid series by Seanan McGuire. And lucky me, the newest book just dropped today! (Book #14!! That’s some staying power.)

I’m just thrilled to have another Mary-centric novel. There’s not a lot I can say without spoiling previous plot points (Again! Fourteen books!) but Mary is such a fascinating character. Despite being a ghost, she’s been the babysitter for generation upon generation of the Healy-Price family while trying to balance it with her other occupation – crossroads ghost, trying to help mortals when they broker deals for the Crossroads. (We know how well those kinds of deals tend to go.) Being a babysitter is work enough, but when the family business is studying and conserving cryptids, and the members have a disturbing tendency to get into live threatening situations? Yeah, even worse.

Mary has experienced some dramatic changes during her afterlife, not just in circumstances but in who she is; she hasn’t been stagnant by any means, despite being a ghost. I’ve loved watching the changes and growth. We also get some more time with Arthur, another favorite character of mine, who’s been through even more drastic changes and is still dealing with the severe after effects. And the Aeslin mice! Look, you need to read this series if only for the Aeslin mice. Trust me on this. Can I have an Aeslin centric novella?

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Books for the chance to read this advanced ARC! All opinions are of course my own.

In the current installment of the InCryptid series, Installment Immortality, Seanan McGuire continues creating a story that is emotional and complex while still full of action. Right from the beginning the novel is off to an exciting start as Mary re-emerges from six months away from her family after she almost got destroyed. The set up of the story and how she is swept up into helping the anima mundi makes for an interesting start but what makes this novel so complex is the way that it addresses and deals with the emotional trauma that both Elsie and Arther have endured.
Throughout the novel, in between helping the ghosts that she encounters, Mary deals with the emotional damage that she caused in disappearing for six months, which although was unavoidable, still left scars on her family. As always when antangling with the Covenant, Mary and the others also have to address the damage done to their family but also in defending themselves, the damage caused to the Covenant and to their agents. The narrative does so in a empathetic straightforward way and while there is not a full resolution with the Covenant, there is a sense of emotional resolution with the ghosts that Mary is there to save. I also happen to love that the spirits and InCryptid are not one dimensional plot devices, they are full characters in their own rights.
If you like urban fantasy with emotional and complex stories, this novel is for you. I do warn you that it is part of a series and if you haven’t read the other books, you may miss some of the plotline. While Seanan McGuire does her best to help salt in information to help with the past story, there are a lot of books to cover and it may be easier to start from the first book. That said, I found this latest installment fast paced, complex emotionally and an ending that ties up Mary’s origins and purpose. And there still is plenty more narrative for more books about the Price family.

I was admittedly drawn to the cover and the title of this fourteenth installment of the Incryptids series. The start of this book catches you up to what has been going on in this series and the Price family so far, and it happens to be a lot of protecting paranormal creatures and cryptids from religious extremists (Covenant of Saint George).

We follow Mary, who is a ghost, as she helps family members and investigates some of the Covenant of Saint George folks. We find out a lot about ghosts, how they work, and some action but we also spend a lot of the book discussing the human characters and their relationships. I will admit that the human characters of this book didn't draw me in as much. I think the book did have moments that dragged but my curiosity about the cryptids and ghosts kept me around. I think this book provided a lot of plot to move the story forward for fans of the series.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for an advanced copy of this book to review.

Ghosts and grief

I read Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon in May, 2021. It was the first book by McGuire I had ever read, and I was immediately hooked. It was full of life, and so funny! The Aeslin mice alone were worth the price. I subsequently went on to read every extant Incryptid novel and story, as well as McGuire's Octboer Daye series, and eventually every work of fiction she's published that I could find.

The first two thirds of Installment Immortality were puzzling. They do all the obvious, concrete things right. The characters are well-drawn and interesting. This is the second Incryptid novel focused on Mary Dunlavy, who has long been one of my favorite Incryptid characters. The plot is intricate, complicated and unpredictable enough to be interesting, and yet not so complicated as to be difficult to follow. It continues the old Price Family vs Covenant of St George conflict that is a through line of the series.

And yet, I had the strangest feeling. The story just seemed to lie there, dead, on the page. All that life and humor I had come to depend on in the Incryptid novels was just missing. The Aeslin mice are mostly absent. It was a slog to read.

Then, after about two-thirds, the story found a center and came to life. The theme of the last third of the novel is grief. The protagonists are Mary and young folks Arthur and Elsie Harrington. Arthur and Elsie's mother Jane was killed by the Covenant in Aftermarket Afterlife. That was recent, and Elsie is still grieving. Arthur is grieving Jane, too, but he has his own problems. Although Mary has been a ghost for the last 77 years, she discovers reservoirs of unresolved grief from the deaths of her mother and father those many years ago.

Mourner's Waltz

Like all of McGuire's Incryptid novels, this one is packaged with a novella. It is called Mourner's Waltz and follows Verity Price. Verity, too is grieving. Her husband Dominic was also killed in Aftermarket Afterlife, and Verity is, not to put too fine a point on it, wallowing in her grief. She is pregnant with Dominic's last child -- their daughter Olivia is staying with the grandparents in Oregon, so Verity is alone. Even aside from the death of the father, it is not an easy pregnancy. Verity is employed as the manager of an apartment building in New York City. The building is owned by the New York dragons and the tenants are all cryptids.

She is confronted by a building maintenance problem of the type she's uniquely qualified to deal with, and at the end we are left with the feeling that she's snapped out of her funk.

in summary, Installment Immortality starts out as a slog but eventually steps up to become a good story. In her Acknowledgements McGuire mentioned that the book was written during the Covid shutdown, so perhaps the blah mood of the first two thirds has something to do with that.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Tor for an advance Reader copy of Installment Immortality. Release date 11-Mar-2025 (tomorrow!).

I love this series! Each installment brings new layers to the past and present of the series. I always look forward to a new book by this author, especially in this series. I'm hoping the next book brings back Laura Campbell and fills us in on what she's been doing.

Installment Immortality is the fourteenth book in the Incryptid series which follows different members of the Price family as they try to protect the cryptid community from The Covenant of St George and others that might hurt it. This story focuses on Mary Dunlavy, part of the Price family, even though she is a former crossroads ghost.

One really nice thing about Installment Immortality is there was a pretty long intro and recap that took up about ten percent of the beginning. A lot has happened through thirteen books and a number of short stories and I had forgotten a few key points. Mary is trying to spread her wings beyond being just a caretaker ghost. After the events of the prior book she has put herself back together and is ready to take on caring for the new generation of the Prices.

The new spiritual sheriff in town has asked Mary for help. Some of the members of the Covenant of Saint George have survived and are messing with the ghost communities up and down the east coast. The anima mundi sends Mary to take care of the situation, but she is going to need some corporeal assistance and asks a few of the fighting age generation to help. Elsie and Arthur are still mourning the loss of their mother and the person Arthur used to be but was erased. They are eager to help Mary if it means getting out of their house and all the depression that lingers there.

I was actually the most interested in Arthur’s potential story line. I loved the build up to his and Sarah’s story line only to become a little heartbroken by the after effects that were brought up in Aftermarket Afterlife. Artie is no more and Arthur isn’t the person everyone expects him to be. The reader gets to explore this and the cracks in the shell of him. It is sad and he is still in a lot of danger. I missed the old Artie too, but liked some of the new characteristics of Arthur.

The plot of the book overall was good. The covenant reeling from the actions of Mary in the prior book have a new target in the ghosts and are trying to create a weapon of them. But by kidnapping them they are causing some unexpected side effects and Mary needs to put a stop to it before humans start to die. Meeting different kinds of ghosts and seeing how they form and linger in their afterlives is always interesting. I do struggle caring about the lives of ghosts over the lives of the living so I have enjoyed the books set more firmly in the physical world of the Incryptid series. That said it was a solid plot.

The only real issue I have, other that Seanan McGuire took one of my favorite couples and destroyed them (at least for now) is that this seemed like it could use a bit more editing. Mary talks about being a crossroads ghost a lot of times throughout the story, but it is really repetitive and almost the same speech every time. There were a few other pieces of information like that when she talked about how she gets to take care of the Price family children and how it works or how her current ghost powers are working.

This being the 14th book of the series, I’m not sure how much longer I will follow this series. The last book was really rough and emotional with some pretty big fallout for main characters of the storylines. For me, some of it is getting stale, the editing may be getting a little lazy and feels a little filler for fifty percent of the book while the other part of the story is fantastic. I love McGuire’s imagination and the types of characters she creates but I almost think the series should have been done a few books ago. I will read the next book because it should be the final to this specific story arc with Arthur and then I will decide for sure if that is my exit from the series.

I am a long time fan of McGuire’s InCryptid series that follows an extended family of conservationist who focus on animals of myth and legends, which in the universe of this Urban Fantasy, are real. In general I would recommend like with most series reading the books in order, but I feel that Installment Immortality would make a decent jumping in point even if you aren’t familiar with the previous books. Perhaps it is the move to a new publisher or it might just be the nature of this story but there is quite of bit of recaping of past events as well as moving the larger story forward.

This like the previous novel focuses on one of the more interesting adopted or found family members of the clan, Mary, who is a ghost and has acted as a baby sitter since early in the family’s history. This gives her a unique perspective which is both motherly towards even the more senior members of the clan and yet still retaining some snark as a perennial teen. Also most of the novels in the series have love stories attached, but Mary’s ghostly nature leaves her seeming both asexual and aromantic; she feels love towards her friends and family in a caregiving way, but seems uninterested in having a romantic relationship, at least not with anyone she has encountered so far in her many years of unlife. I can see this be appealing for those who are looking for a story where a character can have a life filled with significant close bonds without having “one true love” as so many stories do. Also McGuire to focus more on the variety of ghosts including the white ladies, faceless ghosts from Japan, and many others as well as some new InCryptids such as Hockomock Swamp Beasties and Clurichaun.

Complimentary to this tale of the adopted mom of the clan is an included novella of another very pregnant family member in a spin on the blob horror story.

Another awesome adventure in the long-running Incryptid series! Definitely not a starting point for someone new to the series, but for those who've kept up, it's a high-stakes quest story with a ghost narrator and assorted other not-quite-human characters. Fourteen books in, this series remains fresh and exciting.

"Seanan McGuire's New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated InCryptid series continues with a whirlwind adventure....

After four generations of caring for the Price family, Mary Dunlavy has more than earned a break from the ongoing war with the Covenant of St. George. Instead, what she's getting is a new employer in the form of the anima mundi, Earth's living soul made manifest, and a new assignment: to hunt down the Covenant agents on the East Coast and make them stop imprisoning America's ghosts.

All in a day's work for a phantom nanny, even one who'd really rather be teaching her youngest charges how to read.

One ghost can't take on the entire Covenant without backup, which is how she winds up on a road trip with the still-mourning Elsie and the slowly collapsing Arthur, both of whom are reeling in their own way from the loss of their mother. New allies and new enemies await in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the path of the haunting leads.

With the anima mundi demanding results and Mary's newfound freedom at stake, it's down to Mary to make sure that everyone gets out of this adventure alive.

It's been a long afterlife, but Mary Dunlavy's not ready to be exorcised quite yet."

It's March and this is only Seanan's second book of the year!?! Is something off!?!

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
Obviously, there are some spoilers about the previous novel in the series, Aftermarket Afterlife to follow. And, you could probably say the same for the series as a whole. Take that into consideration if you read beyond the period at the end of this sentence.

WHAT'S INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY ABOUT?
In the months that it took Mary to put herself back together after the attack on their training headquarters, the Covenant hasn't been quiet. In fact, as they knew a ghost was involved in the attack, some of them have been targeting ghosts up and down the East Coast.

The anima mundi, still rebuilding its control, recruits (to put it nicely) Mary to stop them and rescue what ghosts she can. Mary gets permission to bring along some help from her family (the kind of help that can't, say, get stuck in a ghost jar)—she doesn't intend to, but she ends up bringing along Elsie and Arthur who have a need to do something, anything, to help them move on from their mother's death.

So begins a cross-country trip filled with more danger than they expect (and they expect a lot).

MORE MARY
This book, like its predecessor, has done a fantastic job of showing the place of Mary in this family. She's far more than just a quick message-delivery-system, or a genie that can show up at just the right time (she never really came across that way, but it'd be easy to see her filling those roles). It's both heart-warming and heart-tugging.

She's also changed a lot—thanks to Annie's intervention at the Crossroads, and because of her new/growing relationship to the anima mundi. And there are more changes on the horizon—which will be fun to watch as people like me have become more invested in her after the last book.

I thought I had several things to say about Mary here, but just about all of them would need to be redacted. I really enjoyed our time with her, and while I expect that we're going to be spending a few books focused on other characters after this one (Verity or Elsie are my guesses, which means it'll probably be Alex), I'm looking forward to seeing what this new part of her life—ahem, afterlife—brings us.

ELSIE AND ARTHUR
Poor Arthur—I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was going on with him after the last book, but of course, there's a lot more afoot than we could've known. With plenty of time with him—to see him interact with Mary and his sister, we get to hear a lot more from him and understand things from his perspective.

Then we learn even more from some outsiders. We're going to have to spend some more time with Arthur soon, because leaving him where McGuire did is not comfortable.

Elsie, on the other hand, surprised me. I figured that like with Alex and Annie—and even the babysitter—when she got a chance to shine, she'd step up and show herself to be exactly the kind of kick-ass heroine that the Prices and Healys seem to specialize in. I won't get into details, but she's not cut from the same cloth as her cousins—but that doesn't mean she should be taken lightly. It's just that there's an element of diversity even here that I wasn't expecting, and I'm glad to see. I think it would've been boring to see her transform into a variation of Verity or Alice.

More interestingly than that for her was seeing her relationship with Arthur and how she's reacting toward the Aeslin mice in their home.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY?
This was a little bit of a let-down after the Aftermarket Afterlife. It was primarily a follow-up to it, tying up loose ends and getting us all ready for whatever is next. As such, it's not going to be as good, it can't be as powerful, and it should help the reader catch our breath. Also, saying it's not quite as good as one of the best books in this series is not much of an insult.

But, oh man...there were so many things that are great about this book. For one example, there's a conversation between Mary and one of the Aeslin Mice that is incredibly strange. And if you remember that we're talking about a conversation between a ghost and a sentient, talking mouse with a perfect memory...strange should be expected. Not this level of it.

Of course, we get to meet new Cryptids, and more than a few ghosts. Their perspectives on the Prices, on the war with the Covenant, on Mary and the Crossroads (many don't believe the Crossroads are gone, for example), and so on, are fascinating. It's a good reminder—that we occasionally get, but not as strongly as we do here—how much people don't instinctively trust this family. But we also get a variety of reactions to them along those lines.

This was very satisfying in terms of long-term character arcs, the war arc, and so on. Installment Immortality was also satisfying on its own terms. There's some good supernatural, ghosty action. Some good reminders that the dead should not be messed with. Strong character development—no one leaves this book the way they came in. And some sweet moments that remind you that everyone can use a dog in their life.

This is not a book to jump into the series with, unless you want to spend a lot of time confused—Aftermarket Afterlife would function far better for that (as would starting at the beginning). But for long-term fans, this is exactly what they were looking for.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Tor Publishing Group via NetGalley in exchange for this post which contains my honest opinion—thanks to both for this.