2019/08: Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day -- Seanan McGuire

There's no drug in this world like the feeling of a ghost touching living skin. Dead people provide a clean, natural, intensely addictive high, one that doesn't come with any downsides. We take time from the living. We leave them younger, and there ain't much humanity won't do for eternal youth. [p. 35]

Jenna is dead. She has an apartment in New York (her landlady Delia is also a ghost, though some of the other tenants are alive) and volunteers at a suicide prevention helpline. Jenna, who ran out into a storm after her sister's suicide and met her death in the dark, needs to take time from the living until she makes it to the date she should have died and can move on to whatever comes next: but she won't take time without earning it, so she tries to prevent people from cutting their own lives short. A forty-seven minute call that prevents a suicide equates to forty-seven minutes that the universe owes to Jenna, forty-seven minutes that she can take from a living person -- making them a little younger in the process.

This precarious arithmetic is interrupted by the news that the ghosts of Manhattan are disappearing. Jenna's friend Brenda, a witch, believes that the ghosts have been captured behind glass. Together (though ghosts don't typically trust witches, who are the only entities who can take time from an unwilling ghost) the two women travel back to Jenna's childhood home to confront the peril.

This is a thought-provoking novella about loss, redemption, mourning and love. It's a natural history of ghosts (I was especially charmed by the tales of dinosaur ghosts, who opted to 'cash in' their remaining years rather than stick around to be classified) and of witches. And it's a novel about female friendship: indeed, all but one of the named characters is female.

SPOILER: I'm not wholly comfortable with Jenna's decision at the end of the story. She leaves behind all the things she has previously cared about -- in particular, the elderly cats (too old to be easily rehomed) that she's taken in -- with barely a backward glance. True, she's earned her time .... I'm not sure, either, that all the strands of the story were tied off neatly. What about the rumour that ghosts were being deliberately made from people killed before they were due to die?

Still, an enjoyable read, with some splendidly-turned phrases.