Review: The Ghosts of Paris

I had heard of Tara Moss’s novel The War Widow when it first came out but never got around to reading it. When I saw that book two, The Ghosts of Paris, was being released, I thought maybe I should check them out. I listened to The War Widow and it was a fine story but didn’t totally blow me away. I was intrigued, though, and wanted to read The Ghosts of Paris anyway. I’m glad I did because I liked it more than the first!

Here’s the book’s description:

It's 1947. The world continues to grapple with the fallout of the Second World War, and former war reporter Billie Walker is finding her feet as an investigator. When a wealthy client hires Billie and her assistant Sam to track down her missing husband, the trail leads Billie back to London and Paris, where Billie's own painful memories also lurk. Jack Rake, Billie's wartime lover and, briefly, husband, is just one of the millions of people who went missing in Europe during the war. What was his fate after they left Paris together?
As Billie's search for her client's husband takes her to both the swanky bars at Paris's famous Ritz hotel and to the dank basements of the infamous Paris morgue, she'll need to keep her gun at the ready, because something even more terrible than a few painful memories might be following her around the city of lights . . .

I can’t put my finger on what it was about book one that didn’t thrill me. The story was interesting - I’m all for Nazis getting their comeuppance - but Billie still felt…unknown to me. Which, I suppose, did make some sense. She has a good reason for being super guarded. She had her heart broken after the war, not to mention all the trauma of living through the war as a reporter (and, just, you know, a human). Maybe it's because I already had a basic understanding of her, but book two just worked better for me, even if the mystery itself wasn’t as impactful as the one in the first.

I do really love Billie. She’s what I hope I would have been like after the war, I think. She worked throughout and did not accept that she had to go back to her little corner with the rest of the women and not make noise. No, sir. That’s not happening. She’s smart and talented, but she’s broken. This book shows the cracks and rips her open even more. It’s an emotional ride, let me tell you.

This may be a historical fiction, with a hefty dose of mystery and intrigue, but there is some romance sprinkled in as well. (Duh, of course I would read a book like that.) I can’t decide which of the three (!) men in Billie’s orbit I want her to end up with. All of them have solid reasons for being worthy of her but she’s not quite ready for any of them. Clearly I’m all in for the next book already!

I liked that Billie is Australian. It adds another perspective to the bazillion World War II novels out there. Sure, it’s yet another Allied country that is very similar to Great Britain, Canada, and the US, but every country had their own unique worries and concerns and I’d like Moss to focus on Australia's a little bit more in the next book.

The historical elements of the novel were really interesting. I’m leaning more into the post-WWII stories lately because there’s a ton of hardship that still happened after the war officially ended that we don’t often focus on. Maybe it’s because we’re dealing with our own global trauma at the moment with the pandemic that these types of things hit a bit harder (no, war does not equal global pandemic but it’s the closest we, in North America, can come to understanding things right now). Moss, thankfully, seemed to tone down explaining every single outfit Billie was wearing but I still got a good sense of the fashion of the time. The description of the flight Billie and Sam had to take from Sydney to London was a hoot and I don’t know how anyone would have been able to deal with such a stupidly long flight with so many stops (I think Billie listed every one when she was talking to her mother and it was…a lot).

The Ghosts of Paris was an entertaining read and I enjoyed the look at post-war Sydney, London, and Paris that Tara Moss provided. Billie Walker continues to be a heroine I’m loving and I’ll for sure pick up the next book in this series. 

*An ARC of this novel was provided by the publisher, HarperCollins Canada, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*