Ghost of the Revelator picks up Doktor Eschbach's and his new wife Llysette Du Boise's lives as her singing career is taking off, and as the messy ending to Of Tangible Ghosts comes back to haunt Eschbach. The story unfolds slowly, but the same wonderful details of everyday life that enlivened the first book -- lunch at a favorite cafe, icy roads, dense, lazy, occasionally sharp students, petty academic politics, politicians who can "smile and smile and be a villain" -- make the trip worthwhile. This world is slower-paced than ours, and Modesitt's prose has something of the heavy Dutch feel of well-fed burghers, shining-clean windows, and tidy lives. Very human. If slow bothers you -- skim.

Mr Modesitt still hasn't smoothed out his jarring exposition of the differences between his alternate world and ours, here usually dumped as interior monologues. Show, don't tell, please!

Llysette sings at a Presidential Arts Awards dinner and is invited to perform at the prestigious Salt Palace in Deseret -- after fleeing the fall of France and an Austrian political prison. Johan comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that he's about to be eclipsed in fame and fortune by his glamorous wife....

...but maybe Deseret is after more than just a performance by the new prima diva. And what about Austria-Hungary? And New France? And the shadowy "Revealed Twelve"?

Minister Eschbach resolves the ensuing international crisis with verve, skill, and a couple of twists that would be unfair to reveal. Suffice it to say that the ending is most satisfactory, and leaves plenty of room for future Eschbach/Du Boise adventures.

Both books are reasonably self-contained, but if you read one and like it, you'll want to read the other, so it makes sense to start with Of Tangible Ghosts.

Doktor Eschbach and the two books have parallels to Mr. Modesitt's real life: the author was a naval aviator, spent twenty years in our "Federal District" as a political aide, EPA staffer, and college teacher. He's married to a lyric soprano (sorceress?, who teaches at Southern Utah University). He and his family moved from DC to New Hampshire ("New Bruges") and then to Utah: these are the settings for both books. "Write what you know," the old adage goes -- it certainly works for Modesitt. I presume the spies and ghosts are from the author's imagination...