The Fetch

The Fetch is about heaven and the afterlife.  A "Fetch" is a being that escorts the dead to heaven.  The Fetch in this story, Calder, gets a huge crush on a human and decides to break all the rules and enter a dead body and return to Earth.  Calder finds out that the woman he is so "in love" with is Tatiana, the wife of the Tsar of Russia.  It's 1918 and if you know Russian history, the Tsar's family all get murdered.

After that, the story got really labored and disjointed for me.  Calder is trying to get back to "heaven" and he needs to take two of the Tsar's children, Alexis and Ana to heaven with him.  So they are dead, but they go on this big around-the-world adventure to try to get back to Heaven.  It's really much more complicated than that, and I was confused by the difference between the dead, the Fetch, the Lost Souls, the Star Fetch, and the Squire. Sometime the scenes switched very quickly -- they were on a train from California to New York, and all the sudden they are in New York.  I just had trouble with the pace, I guess.

On the front of the book it says "A Supernatural Romance" and I guess this is part of the reason I was disappointed with the book.  It really was an adventure, there was very little romance and I found myself being annoyed that it wasn't a romance.  So maybe it's a better book than I'm giving it credit for, because it wasn't what I expected.