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I thought the general premise was interesting, and I was invested in learning more about this world that Doctorow had created, but I also think he wrote himself into a corner with that premise. By eliminating death as a real consequence and then using a murder (plus the threat of more murders) as the catalyst for the plot, he stripped the narrative tension away. One of the first things I learned was that death is a minor inconvenience, so then the murder didn't really mean much to me, no matter how many hoops Doctorow jumped through to try to explain why actually yes this murder matters. Then, of course, there's the concern that even within the confines of this world, I didn't care what happened to the Haunted Mansion. The stakes seemed extraordinarily low, and I could never tell whether the book was aware of that or not.

I got into a full discussion about this book on the Book Fight podcast: