There is mystery from the start of the novel: why did the housemaid, Hazel, leave so suddenly? Why don’t they eat well? Why don’t William and Elizabeth share a bedroom anymore? Why is William so self-absorbed and wilfully blind? He doesn’t help his wife; he doesn’t take the children off her hands, claiming that he’s busy with his work. I really felt for his wife, with her sad drudgery. She seeks solace at her church but then we overhear another woman saying to her, “We have missed you at our church meeting these last few weeks”. There's a real brilliant sense of the time period that this story is set around, the whole idea if there is life after death is such a fascinating one that is wonderfully challenged in the quest of seances being faked. Dark, powerful and twisting – The Spirit Engineerwill leave you wondering what is real and what is illusion' W. C. Ryan, author of A House of Ghosts Is Goligher a fraud? Is Crawford himself a reliable narrator?... West answers these questions with ingenuity and invention' The Sunday Times

Oct: William publishes a second edition of The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (Raps, Levitations, etc) A startlingly brilliant debut from AJ West. A Spirit Engineer is a wonderful tale - full of mystery, intriguing characters and also a surprising amount of humour. I absolutely loved this book, it kept me reading long into the night. Its engaging, spooky, funny and I will thinking about that ending for a long time.

This fantastic debut needs to be added to everyone’s list, and being released in October, it is THE spooky book to read this Halloween. The entire book carries an air of mystery throughout, and at times the story is quite chilling. The reader never really knows what to believe. Are ghosts and the spiritual real, or just an elaborate hoax? At times, the book reads like a psychological thriller because of this.

William, the husband, is an engineering instructor at a boys' school who hopes the textbook he's writing will change their economic outlook and will win him the respect he's convinced is due to him William Crawford is a family man. A man of science and one who will not be duped by these people who claim the dead converse with them, heavens no it’s nothing more than pure fantasy and delusion which people with too much imagination use as a coping mechanism when they refuse to let go of those they have lost. Ok, now that I vented off, I have to say I’m irrevocably in love with the author A.J.West and I solemnly swear that I will read anything and everything he writes, period. The story of The Spirit Engineer takes place in 1914 and it takes you to amazing places with significant real-life events of the period including Titanic and World War I. You even get a glimpse of two key figures in the story, which was such a pleasant surprise that I still couldn’t recover from the events of that chapter. The style and narration is so witty and charming that I do not remember when was the last time I laughed and felt chills at the same time. The unexpected twists and turns was too much for me, I stopped guessing the end after a while and just went with the flow.This is like nothing I have read before - a dance around the outskirts of the spirit revolution of the early 1900s - when parlour seances were all the rage, and charlatans duped the wanting-to-believers. Anyone who follows me will know that more often than not I’m let down or left deflated by an ending. Impatient with a need for closure that I often don’t get…I am thrilled to say this ending took me by the hand, slapped me round the face several times only to give me a gentle kiss goodbye. An absolute dazzler of an ending.