Honour Among Ghosts by Sean Williams

"It is good that the hoodlum gives to the poor, but it is bad that innocent people are blamed, and it very bad that there are poor people in the first place. How can we solve all this at once? We cannot. It is too much. All we have is ourselves, but we are small and we are quick and we are smart. People are not afraid of us. They will tell us things we need to know."

"Sorcerers and scribes use words to change the world, but they do not stand apart from the world, and so the question of how one can avoid changing oneself in the process of casting a spell remains."

Someone is meddling in magic. Things are being stolen and innocent people found with stolen goods and then declared guilty by the town magistrate. Mab (apprentice scribe), Penny (daughter of the town stone mason who is in jail), Colm (son of the magistrate) and Niclas (an orphan traveller boy) will need to work together to solve this mystery and also to set all the adults free from jail. 

Here are some text quotes to give you a flavour of the delightful turn of phrase used in this book:

"There was no 'Upper Rudmere', which occasionally prompted passers-through to suggest changing the welcome sign to read just Rudmere. But what was writ was writ, as the saying went, and who knew what might befall a town if its name on the kingdom's maps was altered?"

"The girl, Mab Grimmer, apprentice to  the village scribe, took the hawthorn twig in her right hand and scratched a series of quick letters into the boy she now held pinned facedown beneath her."

"Ever since the King's proclamation that all traveller troops were to be disbanded, on the grounds of wanton lawlessness across all counties and in every corner on the land, the idea that travellers were thieves was ingrained in the mind of everyone who wasn't actually a traveller."

'it saddened Mab to see her father reduced so. His opinions and prejudices might irk her at regular intervals, but his passion was admirable, and to imagine him thinking, even for a moment, that the constant flow of his protests might cease was oddly troubling ... "

"Dawn the nest morning was noted by clock and candle ... " "Clouds crowded low and threateningly over the village."

"The butter came from cows painted with charms designed (it was claimed) to enhance their milk's flavour." 

I really enjoyed the inventive names in this book - Magistrate Nightwick; Penny Athelbert, Colm Nightwick; Mab Grimmer; Niclas; Mistress Penalune (the town scribe); and Sofia Phronesis.

A class teacher could make really good use of this character description of Inspector Armitage:

"an imposing, bespectacled man wearing a single-breasted sack coat with matching check trousers, all in shades of grey. The glass in his spectacles were smoked, hiding the shade of his eyes. ... (he had) a fine tenor voice and rounded vowels. Removing his hat ... exposed a lumpen and utterly hairless dome with the faintest tracery of scars stretching from one ear to the other, like a web he had walked through and not wiped away."

Here are some wonderful expressions:

• compulsive fabricator
• mortified curiosity
• exonerate one of your own
• you continue to obstruct the truth
• she waved a beringed hand at Colm

Honour among Ghosts is another book I would use to talk about genre labels in a library (I am not a fan) because this book would need numerous stickers - fantasy, mystery, ghost story, magic and crime. I recommend Honour Among Ghosts for mature students with reading stamina aged 10+. This book will be published in September, 2022. Thanks to Beachside Bookshop for my advance copy. 

Read my post about a previous book by Sean Williams:

Her Perilous Mansion