Ah, my good (fictional) friend Tanz is back.

This is the third book in the Accidental Medium series, which tells the story of Tanz, a 30-something actress who recently discovered that she has psychic powers. She lives in a flat in London with her cat Inka, and has two mentors in her journey to understand her new skills: one living and one from beyond. So far, the books have her managing her romantic life with varying success, solving mysteries with her psychic skills, and handling the chaos of acting work, often with lashings of wine and chocolate.

In this book, Tanz is single and ready to mingle, when she’s contracted to a role in the theatre which seems like it will have more drama off the stage than on, if the play even makes it through rehearsal! She’s also contacted by Neil, a policeman from a previous book, who has a colleague who needs help finding a trace of his sister who went missing years before. While looking into it, she’s drawn to Cross Bones, an historical cemetery in Southwark, London, for the poorer, less valued members of society, where the dead are very restless.

I love this series for a few reasons. First of all, the cover designs for my region are so stylish and evocative. They’re a bit like tarot cards and have such great imagery and style. They’re lovely. Secondly, I love the main character, Tanz. She feels very real and relatable, while doing two things that are maybe not so average: being a psychic medium who solves crimes and working as a successful actress. I really like how she navigates her life. She can be kind of messy and imperfect, which makes her human, but she’s also very considerate, caring, fair and often quite funny. She has quite a positive outlook, quite chipper. She’s a very good friend to other characters, a girls girl, someone you can imagine being friends with and who cheers others on. She makes friends with lots of different kinds of people, too. Older, younger, male, female. Different demographics. She likes people. She’s fun to spend time with as you read.

The other side of these stories is the mystery and darker themes and atmosphere. Tanz sense of humour keeps it from being too dark in tone, over all, but the books often involve murder mysteries and the darker aspects of UK history, giving the stories a bit of a gothic tone. And also taking in the landscape of the city, in this case London, though in previous books she has been in other cities as well. Here we see the local colour of flats and high streets, the Borough Market, and of course, the Southwark area. Cross Bones is a real place with a fascinating history, and the author shows us the memorial that it now is, as well as the darkness of it’s past and what is was. Layers of bodies, victims of waves of cholera or typhoid, the burial site of the Winchester Geese, a colloquial name for the local prostitutes in times past, and also an area hit during WW2. We have history and ghosts, hauntings and murders, and I am here for it.

I really liked this entry in the series as much, if not more than the previous ones. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to read more. Hopefully there will be another book soon.

Read It If: you like tarot cards and cozy mysteries. This series is fun and upbeat while also being dark and mysterious.

Thank you to PGC Books for the copy of this book for review.