Eric Carter has gotten himself into a lot of trouble over the years. He’s had to solve his own sister’s murder while avoiding the attention of Santa Muerte. He’s ended up married to the patroness of death while trying to avoid a psychopathic skin walker. He’s slowly turned to jade while taking on the role of Mictlanetcuhtli, king of the Aztec underworld and Santa Muerte’s ex, while both gods try to use him as an assassin against each other. He’s been framed for the murders of other mages while being chased by Quetzalcoatl who will burn the entire city of LA down to get to Eric.

Now… after the recent influx of dead, the barrier between the living and dead is cracking, allowing another mage to pull life-sucking ghosts through the divide and use them as weapons.

Oh, and Carter still owes Santa Muerte some time in Mictlan.

First, though, he needs to get rid of the human ghost grenades.

Ghost Money is Blackmoore’s fifth Eric Carter book, and a fifth book is usually the point at which a series is either limping along desperately clutching for one last story to tell or the author has chosen to wind down. Thankfully, neither is the case with Blackmoore’s tales of the LA necromancer who occasionally tries to be a decent person but is mostly just trying to survive.

If anything, Ghost Money ramps up both the action and the stakes for Carter by bringing more of his past – past we readers haven’t yet heard about – into his already complicated, bloody, burned-out present. I’m talking about his “way back”… the era before which Carter developed even a rudimentary conscience.

You see, Carter spent some time in China. He did some unsavory things for some unsavory people. Those people have come calling and they’ve brought the Triads with them. And the Triads are armed with some very nasty magic.

Things, as you may imagine, do not go well. Of course, that means something different for Eric Carter, a man with whom “death doesn’t know what to do.”

Damn, I loved this book.

It’s snappy. It’s well paced. It’s… kind of gross, but in the perfect urban fantasy way (don’t judge). Blackmoore writes Carter as both a character who grows and changes and exists as a constant, which is no easy feat. And yet, no matter what happens to him, no matter what he takes on, Carter is always fundamentally himself. You don’t always like him and yet, somehow, you always end up rooting for him.

Blackmoore is also a master of the little things: details readers may not always notice but, if they were missing, would leave Carter’s world incomplete. The intimate knowledge of LA. Eric’s Nazi-possessed Browning that whispers for blood. His magical pocket watch. The plausible if unlikely history of Darius the genie’s bottle. The scent that precedes Santa Muerte wherever she goes. Ghost money. Vortex grenades.

And underneath it all, despite the fantasy backdrop, is a solid sense of place.

Yes, Ghost Money is urban fantasy, but it’s urban fantasy that happens in a very specific location. Blackmoore himself is going to join us for a guest essay that speaks a more about why Carter’s tale could only ever unfold in LA specifically, but I want to touch on it here because it matters that this story – a story that envelopes multiple cultures, mythologies, and nationalities – happens in a large, American city. Why it could only happen here. Why there’s nowhere else in the world the Jade Emperor and Santa Muerte and Eric Carter could come together and spin this story.

It’s important to note, in this time of political upheaval, and it’s a point we should embrace when things seem to be falling apart.

There’s a reason dystopian fiction and urban fantasy are popular when the world seems bleak. They allow us to work out our fears in a safe space, to give them a supernatural edge that makes those worlds other, to keep them at enough of a distance that we can create and absorb without anxious immediacy.

But those genres can also give us hope. Because despite the upheaval in Fire Season, LA is still there for Carter to defend in Ghost Money. Is it changed? Sure. Diminished? Yes. But it’s still there. The people and mythologies and cultures that filled her? Still there.

So enjoy the story. And let it be a lesson to us. If Eric Carter can make a deal with Death and the Triads and Vivian? Well, we can certainly come out the other side of this.