The Skeleton Key - Tara Moss

The Skeleton Key (Pandora English#3) - Tara Moss

Grade: YA

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

In the third Pandora English mystery, Pandora is still negotiating her double life as a lowly assistant at a New York fashion magazine with the reality that she has great supernatural powers and responsibilities.

With the full moon set to rise once again, Pandora has a very special date looming. Her beautiful spirit guide, Civil War soldier Lieutenant Luke, will be a flesh-and-blood man, if only for the night, and she hasn't been able to stop thinking about it. But a chance encounter with playboy Jay Rockwell sees that very human attraction start all over again – even though Jay doesn't remember their previous relationship, or the fact that Pandora saved him from a gang of ill-tempered undead supermodels.

Meanwhile, Pandora – with her special skeleton key – is slowly unlocking the mysteries of the haunted mansion where she lives with her great aunt Celia. What sinister experiments did the architect Dr Edmund Barrett conduct there before he died? Where is his laboratory? And what are the strange noises emanating from the basement?

On the centenary of the mysterious fire that supposedly killed Dr Barrett, he returns to the mansion. He has a message for Pandora. But he has brought with him a dark force that threatens to tear apart the delicate balance between the worlds of the dead and living...(Description from Goodreads)

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This is the third novel in the Pandora English series. After defeating the Spider Goddess, Pandora finally gets told what it means to be the Seventh- it involves standing between the dead that want to rule the world and us mortals who inhabit it. Unfortunately, she doesn't know exactly "how" she's meant to stop this from happening. It also involves having powerful supernatural beings naturally seeking her out- oh joy!

I liked seeing Pandora's powers emerge. With this book I felt like the series was really starting to pick up its pace.

This novel focuses on the creepy mansion that is Pandora's new home. Pandora has been given the skeleton key to the mansion and told to go explore. But when Lieutenant Luke says there's a powerful force within the mansion before disappearing himself, you kinda wish Pandora would stop exploring and just go hide in her room.

I found this book to be a lot creepier than the last two. Probably because I have a phobia of haunted mansions. Give me vampires, werewolves or fey over ghosts any day. And the creepy ghost of one of the originally owners, (who doesn't speak but just expects Pandora to follow) makes me shudder. Maybe, as crazy as it seems, this is the reason I enjoyed this book more than the others. By half way through I could ignore the frustration of not knowing what was going on, and just go along with the ride that is The Skeleton Key.

Kerrie

(Originally posted on Goodreads)