The Other Side of Midnight by Simone St. James

Simone St. James has quickly become one of "those" authors:  I eagerly await her latest book, and will buy it without hesitation.  I've got to wait until April 2016 for her next one!  I'll try to be patient. 

The Other Side of Midnight follows a similar plot found in Ms. St. James' previous novels:  a single young woman in 1920's England finds herself tangled up in a paranormal mystery that she must solve.  The themes running through these novels are the effects of World War I on those who survived it, and the changing world of women in the 1920's.  

Ellie Winter is a young woman who spends her days using her psychic skills helping clients find things they have lost.  What Ellie knows and what eveyone else doesn't know is that she is the real deal:  someone who can see and communicate with the dead.  She can read people and freak them out with her accuracy.  But she takes great pains to hide that part of herself because of the disastrous "outing" of her mother years ago, which ended her mother's career as the Fantastique.  Now Ellie is all alone in London, and bitter about losing her mother in the scandal that James Hawley and the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research created by testing her mother's skills.  

But one day Ellie gets a visitor, who tells Ellie his sister, the infamous psychic and party girl Gloria Sutter, has been murdered.  Gloria, a former friend of Ellie, left her brother a note, telling him that Ellie would find out what happened.  Ellie wants no part of it, but becomes reluctantly drawn into the mystery of Gloria's murder as she struggles to put all the pieces together.  It's a pretty interesting murder mystery, and actually a pretty clever twist.  

Meanwhile, James and Ellie are thrown together to figure out who killed Gloria and who's made Ellie their next target.  Ellie will be forced to use her abilities to solve the mystery.  Will a romance with James that had potential all those years before come to fruition?  

I like St. James' atmospheric novels.  They have just the right touch of paranormal, and a heroine who is afraid but keeps moving towards a resolution. London in the 1920's is always fascinating as well, and the specter of World War I looms over all of it.  You can read all of St. James' novels in any order; each are a standalone.  A great blend of history, mystery, and the unknown.  

Rating:  7/10 for an interesting twist to a whodunnit.  

Available in paperback and e-book. 

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The Other Side of Midnight by Simone St. James