This is my earliest Jones book and I remember liking it very much. Not as much as I loved the author's other works though (i.e. Howl's Moving Castle and Hexwood). I always have a penchant for deliciously dark tales, especially the kind that confuses the readers in a good way and in so many levels.

The Time of the Ghost is a perplexing story, the main reason being the unreliability of the narrator who is a ghost. She doesn't know who she is. The only things that she's sure of are 1) an accident has happened to her and 2) she's one of the Melford sisters: Cart, Imogen, Sally, and Fenella. The ghost is strikingly different from the sisters so the readers couldn't guess easily who the ghost really is; the ghost thinks she's Sally though, since the said girl is absent for a good two quarters of the book. Apparently there's been a "plan", and the ghost thinks that this scheme involves killing her. In attempts to uncover what really happened that precipitated in her being a ghost, she does some "detective" hovering and fluttering around (haha) and finds out that the sisters has unwittingly woken an ancient evil in the form of a mildewy rag doll called Monigan. Feeling its unnerving power, the ghost readily suspects that it has something to do with her present condition.

It's a decent and lovely book, I guess. Twisted, morbid, and dark maybe, but lovely just the same. The well thought out and sinister characters seem to pop out of the book; the setting eerily feels real with just the effortless descriptions that Jones is using. :)

It's probably not the best Jones book, but it's definitely worth the read.