The Solitaire Ghost, by Sylvia Kelso

The Solitaire Ghost by Sylvia Kelso

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dorian is the junior partner of an Ibisville, North Queensland law firm and she has a good life: a good apartment, close friends, and a strong relationship with a great guy. Then, one day she, while “[juggling] a trio of lunch bags” in the elevator in her building, on the way to her law firm’s office on the eighth floor, Dorian sees a ghost. A tall man, he walks out of the elevator floor. He has a beard like a Victorian patriarch, “dark, the rich bronzed dark of a red-cedar wood. A young man’s beard, live and thick as a bush” (9), and he balances a miner’s panning dish on her head.

Things change pretty quickly after that. Dorian finds herself facing danger, tragedy, one mystery after another, break-ins, spectral and not so spectral, an evil American megacorporation up to no good at all, and somehow, some way or another, she has to adjust her idea of how things are to accommodate her ghost—who, it seems, really isn’t, but rather a 19th-century Irish activist, Jimmy Keenighan, who has wound up in Dorian’s time and place. Or rather the time streams of the past and present are somehow intersecting.

This multilayered, multifaceted novel, and its sequel, The Time Seam: Blackston Gold, Book Two, are among Kelso’s best. Yes, as the book jacket says, “Solitaire Ghost is a fast-moving combination of suspense and time-romance, played out in an Australian setting.” True enough, but that falls short of all that Kelso has got going on here—(and let me say for the record I am a Kelso fan). The novel is a love story—and yes, one eventual couple has the added complication of being from different centuries—and it is a ghost story. To suspense, I would add mystery and legal thriller: the novel is fast-moving and a page turner. Once I started, I kept going. Solitaire Ghost is also about language and voices, and history and storytelling, as well as about geology and gold mines—the Solitaire is an old gold mine—and Australia. Add to that heady mix, The Solitaire Ghost is about good and evil and corporate power and greed. The result is a rich and compelling novel. The bad guys are really bad, yet still human—as are the flawed, engaging and likeable heroes.

All these seemingly disparate elements are skillfully and gracefully woven together and work together into a well-crafted, and detailed world—both and present. Kelso’s talent as a writer and a storyteller and a wordsmith shines in this well-told tale.
Highly recommended.




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