Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst is a police story masquerading as a ghost story. The dead have their issues, but the book spends most of its time on the living, who are not doing a very good job of being alive.
Mike Mercer sees dead people, which can be a problem when you work in Colma, California, a town just outside San Francisco that is filled with cemeteries. Nearing 30, Mike has joined the police force in Colma after several years of post-college bouncing around, tending bar mostly. He still doesn't feel settled. He lives in the worst apartment complex in town, simply because it's cheap. His girlfriend is 15 years his senior, a fact he is not completely comfortable with. His friends are the ones he made in high school, and they are all successful and making money.
Mike and his partner are on patrol one night when Mike spots signs of disturbance in a cemetery: tire tracks, footprints leading to a grotto that once held hundreds of dead. His partner is skeptical, but Mike gets out to investigate and hears a faint moan on the wind. In the pit, a kid is stuck head-first into one of the holes that held bodies. Mike rescues the young man, who turns out to be Jude DiMaio, the 16-year-old son of legendary movie director Marco DiMaio.
Mike replaced an older cop named Featherstone, who was found dead in his patrol car outside one of the cemeteries with a look of fear on his face. When Officer Featherstone's widow sells her house and moves into the same apartment complex as Mike, she gives Mike boxes of papers Featherstone left in his garage. Curious, Mike looks in the boxes and finds reams of incident reports involving ghosts. At first Mike pities Featherstone—but not for long—as Mike first fears, then accepts, that he is seeing the very same ghosts.
Alive in Necropolis may be a ghost story, but the dead stay on the periphery, waiting for Mike to understand that they are there and that he can help them. Most of the book is spent on the struggles of the living, and they aren't pretty. Mike suffers injury after injury, both physical and psychic. Jude can't get out of his own way. Mrs. Featherstone develops dangerous habits. Mike's partner Nick Toronto melts down after an incident with a woman.
The book is well-written, and Dorst's depiction of small-town policing is detailed and rings with authenticity. I still found the novel less than satisfying, however. Mike spends most of the book somewhat incapacitated by his injuries and lack of sleep, which gets old. When the resolutions to the many story threads come, they are told from a distance, not from the characters' points of view, which is distinctly little payoff for 400 pages of strife. The ghosts play too small a part for a ghost story; the mechanics of their world remained largely unexplored and they could almost have been left out completely.
If you're interested in a police procedural and don't mind a supernatural sideline, then perhaps Alive in Necropolis is the book for you. If you're looking for a good ghost story, you'd best look for your haunting elsewhere.
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