I went to a lot of trouble to get this book. It showed up on my Kindle Daily Deals page for $3.99, but clicking on the link only showed it at full price. I spent way too long chatting with customer service and I ended up having to buy it at full price and then Amazon refunded me the difference. I wish I could say it was worth the effort.

Joaquin and Gabriel are teenage boys in Mexico, brought together by tragedy. They are riding with their respective parents when their cars crash into each other, killing both sets of parents and leaving the boys orphans. They spend time in the hospital together, forging a very special friendship. When they are taken in by family, they end up living in the same neighborhood, continuing that friendship through their love of music. Not just any music – they create soundscapes, recording the sounds of their neighborhood, all the strange, discordant sounds they can find in the city, layering them and mixing them with instruments into something that is not necessarily easy to listen to.

The friendship ends in a different sort of tragedy. Joaquin goes on to host a late-night radio show, Ghost Radio, where listeners call in and tell their ghost stories, their paranormal encounters. He works with his girlfriend, Alondra, and his long-time sound engineer, Watt. But sometimes, things get strange. Joaquin becomes convinced that his dead friend is trying to reach out to him through the radio waves. He is losing touch with reality. He is having hallucinations – or are they? He can’t trust his memory, as he learns that things he has always known may not be true. His friends are worried about him, and Joaquin begins to wonder if Gabriel wants to reconnect, or do him harm.

It’s a pretty cool premise and there are some great passages, really interesting sections, but in the end it becomes a bit of a muddled mess. There is a weird subplot about Toltec priests, a crazy run-in with TSA, and an ending that manages to be both abrupt and long overdue. (And really, it felt like we’d moved into urban legend territory and wandered into The Backrooms.)

I really wanted to like this one, but I couldn’t manage it. The plot stopped making sense and I just wanted to get through the last third of it.