Review: The Haunting of Tram Car 015

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Set in an alternate world Cairo in 1912, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 offers a world in which djinn walk and work freely with humans. Agents Hamed Nasr and Onsi Youssef of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities have been assigned to figure out how to fix a haunted tram car. Superintendent Bashir thinks it's a ghost who attacked a woman on the tram but Hamed doesn't believe in ghosts since in the Ministry's thirty years of operation, none has ever been proven. He thinks whatever is haunting Tram Car 015 has to be a djinn. But what if he and Bashir are both very wrong? Their pursuit of solving this haunting takes them from zār-practicing Sufi spiritualists to dollmakers, and along the way we meet a gendershifting djinn who smells of jasmine, honey and cinnamon, and an a freed automaton.

An utter delight. I'd love to see a full length novel in this world, frankly. I want more Hamed, Onsi, Abla, Naadiya, Fahima and Jizzu!

I received a paper review copy in exchange for an honest review.

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