An uneven effort by an author I recently allotted 5 massive stars to for his recent book A Ladder to the Sky. Yeah, I’m not into ghost stories but I’ve read a few that were well written and original enough to hold my interest. This book relied too much on a protagonist who was slow on the uptake and unrealistically brave. The denouement was cliché and written as if for film, a pet peeve, and the big reveals were too easily guessed. The book also needed an editing pass to clean up contradictory passages, of which there were quite a few. Oh, and the attempt to write in an old fashioned way fell flat for me. I’ve seen that done much better.