This has all the hallmarks of Slatter's other Sourdough novels: Supremely confident female characters wielding power in a richly realized world, leaving corpses in the wake of some extremely unhealthy family dynamics. This one in particular has a bit of the flavour of a mirror-universe Lancre, in which the tropes are played straight. In the town of Silverton, the Briar family of witches has held sway for centuries, under the benign dictatorship of the Briar Witch, supported by her Steward and her Marshall. Silverton has prospered; the priests (god-hounds, a delightful term) are kept at bay, and all is well. Except that a generation of Briar witches has been lost to plague and madness, and the new generation finds that it is not straightforward to step into their forbears' shoes. In part that may be because the incoming steward, Ellie Briar, is not, herself a witch. For some reason or other, the Briar magic has passed her by, and she must carry out her responsibilities with no other power than mundane competence. Or perhaps it is that Ellie's cousin Audra, the new Briar Witch, is too reliant on her magic and neglectful of her mundane dutues. Or perhaps it is that there is a string of disappearances and sudden deaths which, coming hard on the heels of the sudden demise of the previous Briar Witch looks much too suspicious to be a coincidence. And then the ghosts are returning, for the first time in 300 years.

The book is an enjoyable tale, with a distinct mood. I found the attention given to show Ellie's logistical competence very pleasing. Something about slice-of-life fantasy where the slices of life are treated as genuinely important, with real consequences, rather than pleasant fluff to line the next of cosy fantasy, is always satisfying to me. And I really  enjoyed how a particular decision not to share knowledge turns out not to be a tedious way of spinning drama out of forced ignorance, but in fact serves to resolve a problem, rather than create or perpetuate it. But I still found myself getting a little bit restless as the book progressed. I didn't quite have a sense of what the plot actually was. There are hints at mysteries, but they're never foregrounded enough to drive the plot; and indeed I had guessed who was behind it early enough that the lack of development made me feel as if things were dragging. Too much reactivity; not enough praction. Even the ready profusion of fresh corpses failed to juice events into action. Corpse-based narrative worked quite well in other books, but not quite as well here.