A chipper yarn

Inamorata by Joseph Gangemi: On a scale from brutal to brilliant, this falls somewhere in between but generally on the positive side of things. My greatest complaint—a minor quibble, really—is with the phrase “never fall in love with a medium,” which first assaults the reader on the back cover: “…the man of science breaks the cardinal rule of psychic investigation: Never fall in love with the medium.” Fine, okay, great. Two times? Okay, that’s understandable; even three times in the entire scope of the work would be a decent amount of repetition. But in the last sixty pages (I’m guessing), this phrase crops up probably seven or eight times. Which, despite its marked relevance to the story, it simply isn’t a particularly astounding phrase. Otherwise a good, generally well-paced and entertaining story. Historical to the 1920s, the story of Scientific American’s investigation of purported psychics is inspired by real-life events and transposed (among other things) from Boston to Gangemi’s Philadelphia.