The Spirit Engineer: Winner of the HWA Debut Crown Award 2022

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Some of the characters are a little too predictable but there is nothing predictable about the end. As the story progressed it got increasingly more creepy, and I felt utterly transported into the seance scenes. This is a book that makes you feel as though you have read it with all 5 senses. Each of the characters were brilliantly developed, and I loved watching our morally grey main character become consumed by his obsession, and how his relationships were strained and tested as a consequence. Harry Houdini once said, "what the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes". And it is very much that way in The Spirit Engineer.

The Spirit Engineer by A.J. West has won the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) Debut Crown Award 2022. However in the last few chapters I was practically on the edge of my seat and on closing the book found myself straight onto Google researching 😂 Got to admit I did like that ending and didn’t see it going that way at all. Really brilliantly done. The inspiration to write The Spirit Engineer appeared, appropriately enough, one dark Belfast night in the middle of a winter storm. I was reading Harry Houdini’s diaries when the great magician mentioned, in passing, a meeting with a ‘mad’ professor. Crawford’s story is virtually unknown, yet any novelist would struggle to find a tale steeped in such gothic tragedy. This one is a perfect creepy read for spooky season. I especially loved the fact that this was based on a true story, so it felt like while I was entertained I was learning a fun piece of history. Working at the Belfast Technical Institute, William would have had easy access to potassium cyanide powder, which was used in the electroplating process and also for developing early photographic plates. Stores in both the engineering laboratories and photographic studios likely held quantities of potassium cyanide. Seamus Stoupe, who produced William’s famous photographs, was head of the Art Department and would have had access to the photography stores.

This is like nothing I have read before - a dance around the outskirts of the spirit revolution of the early 1900s - when parlour seances were all the rage, and charlatans duped the wanting-to-believers. Set in a historical moment where science and spiritualism meet, The Spirit Engineer is an ingeniously plotted debut novel.' SARAH BURTON, AUTHOR OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF H WJC’s mother Agnes died of a pulmonary embolism arising from a pre-existing thrombosis. Whilst it may be co-incidental to the birth of the youngest child, I have it on very good authority that PEs are more common in pregnancy/childbirth so your suggestion that she died inchildbirth is not too far off the mark. The entire book carries an air of mystery throughout, and at times the story is quite chilling. The reader never really knows what to believe. Are ghosts and the spiritual real, or just an elaborate hoax? At times, the book reads like a psychological thriller because of this. Professor William Crawford is a rational man. An engineer, he teaches at the local institute in Belfast, only just keeping his family financially afloat, and he awaits the success of his next book, to release them from the goodwill of the not very likeable Aunt Adelia, who dangles the financial carrot in front of the family she likes to keep as a pet project.

The plot is fast and evenly-paced. Part of the reason that I couldn’t stop reading this book is because there is always something chilling, or hectic, or haunting happening. There are several twists near the end that just left me gasping (one of which I saw coming a mile away but one that completely blind-sided me!) It had me thinking about the story long after I had finished reading it. Brilliant, haunting characters

First, I will probably be in the minority on this one, but not every book is for every person. I am not a real fan of historical fiction, but I am a fan of ghosts and psychics and mediums, so I thought..... There's a real brilliant sense of the time period that this story is set around, the whole idea if there is life after death is such a fascinating one that is wonderfully challenged in the quest of seances being faked.