Lost

September 10, 2001
Before he broke onto the adult bestseller lists with his irreverent interpretations of the Cinderella story (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister) and the Wizard of Oz (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West), Maguire wrote children's books with titles like Six Haunted Hairdos, Seven Spiders Spinning
and Four Stupid Cupids. His latest is a virtual literary paella of adult and children's fantasies: Jack the Ripper, A Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Exorcist—
even a wafting glimpse of Dracula. The result is a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story that easily elicits suspension of disbelief. American writer Winifred Rudge, whose mass market book about astrology has been far more successful than her fiction, is in London to research a novel linking Jack the Ripper to the house in Hampstead where her own great-great-grandfather—rumored to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge—lived. But as Winifred discovers, there is no evidence that the Ripper ever visited Hampstead, let alone buried one of his victims inside the chimney of a house there, and his presence in the story is a red herring. Much more interesting is the mysterious disappearance of Winnie's cousin, John Comestor, the latest resident of the family house. Moreover, something is making an infernal racket inside the chimney, and soon there are other bizarre manifestations of some unseen force. A Dickensian assortment of neighbors (one dotty lady is called Mrs. Maddingly) variously obfuscate and hint at strange events. Maguire's prose is both jaunty and scary; he knows how to mix spooky ingredients with contemporary situations. By the time a spirit called Gervasa begins to speak through Winnie, readers will be hooked.

December 24, 2007
Maguire's brilliantly imaginative tale of a novelist haunted by the unsettled spirits of Jack the Ripper, Ebenezer Scrooge and her very own past is brought to life by narrator Jenny Sterlin. An experienced children's fiction narrator, Sterlin brings an air of the fantastic and otherworldly to this supernatural tale. With her classically trained British accent the story becomes a fairy tale of sorts. Sterlin's superb reading guides listeners through the gloomy atmosphere of Maguire's London. With a large cast of murky and mysterious Londoners to voice, Sterlin provides a variety of grainy dialects and accents that help define each individually. Sterlin knows how to get and hold one's attention, and her sharp and often menacing tone demands the audience's consideration at every crucial and thrilling plot twist. Playing this audiobook with the lights down low on a blustery winter night is sure to spark the imaginations of listeners of all ages. A Harper paperback (Reviews, Sept. 10, 2001).

October 1, 2001
Children's novelist Winifred Rudge flies from her Boston-area home to London to pay a visit to her distant cousin and old friend John. Instead of receiving his guest open-armed, John is nowhere to be found. His office staff is evasive in fielding Winnie's calls, and Mac and Jenkins, a pair of superstitious home remodelers hired by John to work on the kitchen in his absence, begin behaving strangely, as eerie symbols appear on the wall and inexplicable noises issue from the walled-up chimney space. That Winnie is not alone in her victimization by an otherworldly spirit is a good sign she's not having a breakdown. Maguire, who already has two best sellers to his credit (e.g., Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister) makes the supernatural chillingly real. Setting the story in Winnie and John's ancestral home and filling the neighboring house with John's intimidating new inamorata, Allegra, makes us root for the self-destructive Winnie, a most unlikely heroine. An essential purchase and a substantial Halloween treat. Margee Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2001
Winifred Rudge is a writer who has published several children's books and one successful astrology book. She's working on a new novel and is unable to get the central character, Wendy Pritzke, out of her head. Winifred travels to England to visit her cousin, John Comestor, but she's surprised to find him absent when she arrives. As the days go by, Winifred begins to suspect that John is missing and possibly in trouble, and she can't seem to get any useful information from his eccentric tenant, the contractors working on John's flat, or John's sometimes girlfriend, Allegra. What Winifred does discover is that John's flat appears to be haunted and that the ghostly happenings are dredging up the deeply buried past she has been avoiding for so long. Though a slow beginning and the fact that the ghost story and Winifred's troubled history don't gel together well hamper the narrative, but Maguire, the author of the popular novels " Wicked" (1996) and " Confessions of an Ugly Step"sister (1999), brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)