The Whispering Skull

The Whispering Skull is a novel by the English writer Jonathan Stroud, published in the United States in September 2014 and in the United Kingdom the following year. It is the second book of the Lockwood & Co. series.

The series is set in a London where ghosts are a daily hazard and the work of finding and containing them is done by agencies that employ children, because children are the ones with the necessary talent. Anthony Lockwood runs one of the smallest of those agencies, with Lucy Carlyle and George Cubbins, and by the time this book opens the three of them have been short of work for months. A fit of temper leads Lockwood to challenge his rival at the Fittes agency to a competition, with the loser required to admit the defeat in public, and a new client then asks the firm to seal the coffin of a man called Edmund Bickerstaff. The job releases both a phantom and a source of considerable power, and the agency has to get it back.

Lucy narrates the books, and her ability to hear the dead gives the reader an account of the trade that the agencies would prefer to keep to themselves.