Ghostly Echoes: A Jackaby Novel

I’m little upset by how the series changed from the first book. This series started out with a comical Sherlock type series that involves the supernatural world (it’s all science, not magic), and de-escalated into Jackaby being overly serious and opting for more magic based thinking (your house, your world). He also seems to rely more on his seer gift than his deductive reasoning, which is fine but I feel like it’s not true to the character we saw in Jackaby. I also really didn’t appreciate the EXTREMELY out of place political insertion of a trans character. It felt forced, jarring, and like the author needed to add this just because it’s the current trend to have inclusion. Said character didn’t contribute much for the story aside from cause the author to write several pages about how it doesn’t matter what we see, it’s how they see themselves. The author takes time to insert historically accurate modesty throughout the books, but decides that the characters are ok with this even though it would have been scandalous to agree with jackaby at the time. Without getting too spoiler-y, this story was all over the place between the different possessions, the creatures that showed up, and the different “locations”. I understand that it’s setting up the next book, but I missed the Sherlock-esque feeling of the books; clues, deductive reasoning, and team work. While I didn’t hated my time reading this installment, I can’t say I really enjoyed myself either. I found that I would get through a couple pages then check my email, get back to reading, then check to see if I had any app updates, read more then see what my dogs were up to (asleep), etc. I’m hoping the next book pulls me in a little more.