This dragged. Its plot and conceit were perfectly serviceable, and I think the characters were well developed, with believable personalities. The structural tensions were all there. Thinking back on the shape of the plot, I can see it's actually perfectly well developed: Maeve, a nun responsible for dispelling ghosts and ensuring the dead rest in peace, runs across a mysterious stranger who makes a deal with her: she helps the stranger--the titular Imogen Madrigal, who is actually a reanimated corpse--discover who killed her, and the Imogen will use her influence to help Maeve support her nunnery's weakening finances. This is all nicely set up: Maeve has the expertise in hauntings and ghosts and death to work effectively with a reanimated corpse. Imogen, however, is affiliated with a network of louche and hedonous poets, whom the nunnery really doesn't care for (for reasons that are never fully clear to me; it's not moral tut-tutting; it's more that they like to do things like seances, which the nunnery thinks are cruel to the dead), and also had ties to the university, which the nunnery also doesn't get on with, because the spiritual vs. scientific approaches to ghost are incompatible. The society built for this world was nicely designed, and I  enjoyed the various visits Maeve makes on her nunnish errands to dispel spirits in various places that lay out the various factions and philosophies. Also, someone keeps trying to kill Imogen again and finish the job properly, so Maeve's under some pressure to clear things up fast. Really, all the pieces are there for a rollicking romp.

But the rollicking never actually romped. Everything just dragged. The repeated murder attempts are never quite frequent enough to convey a sense of genuine threat, so they appear kind of randomly and desultorily rather than actually reinforcing the fact that there are dangerous people operating in opposition to Imogen and Maeve. Instead, most of the plot focuses its attention on the growing tensions between Maeve and Imogen (nudge nudge wink wink), and related but different tensions brewing between Maeve and her best friend--a plot point also takes far too long to come to a head. Everything needed to be tightened up substantially. I felt like I wanted to be halfway through the book at 30%, and by the time I was at 60% I wanted to be hitting the climax. Literally, this book was too long by half.

Further, one quite key plot element, which seemed far too central given its awkwardness and unnnecessariness, really irritated me. See, the world was designed to be at a technological level of--oh, say, 1920 or so. Telephones exist but are uncommon, and electricity exists but not everywhere. Imogen was murdered by having her throat cut, so she can't talk very well out of it even after her corpse reanimated. So how does she communicate? With cell phones! Excuse me--not cell phones, 'hand telegraphs'--which work exactly like modern text messaging. But there isn't really any plot-necessary purpose that I can see for shoe-horning in such an obvious modern device. First, I don't fully understand why Imogen can't just talk. There's perhaps a hint that her inability to speak fluently is particularly trying, given how much she used to rely on language during life as a poet, but that doesn't become clear until very, very late in the book, and is not thematically important enough to justify such a weird narrative choice. There's very little use of text messaging that takes advantage of its use for remote communication--certainly nothing that a well-placed messenger child couldn't handle--or even a traditional telegraph boy. It's mostly just how Imogen and Maeve talk to each other during in-person conversations. And yet Imogen's communicative habits don't actually match the medium. There are scenes where Maeve interrupts her at places where a speaking person would interrupt another speaking person, but it doesn't work for text messaging, because the interruption would either appear earlier--if the words appear one at a time on her receiver--or else much later, after the message is complete, if the text messages are sent in whole chunks once the texter hits 'send', the way modern cell phones do. These hand telegraphs were an enormous component of how Maeve and Imogen communicate, and they just didn't work. Every scene with them felt forced and weird, as if the author is incapable of imagining how to function without a cell phone, and so had to force a weird approximation of them into the world she'd created. There is MAGIC and GHOSTS. If you really want Imogen incapable of speaking (which is not really necessary, as far as I can tell), have her use MAGIC. (Also, these 'hand telegraphs', if they truly work by radio waves, the way a scientist explains, seem a WILDLY INSECURE means of communication if you're trying to avoid letting a killer know your plans.)

There were also some irritating editing oversights. Imogen and Maeve are hiding from a killer at one point in a cellar, and so start writing back and forth in Maeve's sketchbook to communicate.  For a few sentences Maeve speaks aloud before returning to writing down her thoughts so as not to be heard--apparently a concern she'd forgotten half a page up. And, for that matter, why not use their hand telegraphs rather than writing by hand? For that matter, there are multiple scenes where Imogen writes to Maeve in a sketchbook rather than using a hand telegraph, for no other reason than that--as far as I can tell--a previous draft had Imogen using hand-writing, before the author decided to insert cell phones--excuse me, hand telegraphs--and forgot to change it everywhere.

So, in sum, this book felt very, very first novel: too long, some odd plot decisions, and some weak editing--but the components for a much better story were all in place. I hope the author can wrangle them more successfully next time. 

NB: I was provided with a free ARC of this book from Netgalley. Inasmuch as I can be sure of such things, I do not believe it has affected the content of this review.