Georgia's stuck in the vagabond life of an adjunct professor. No tenure, fewer benefits, lousy pay. She gets a job at her old university, and moves herself and her teenage daughter into her parents' house while they're away on sabbatical.
But the house isn't entirely empty, because there's Sid. Sid is a human skeleton that talks and walks and all that. He saved 6-year-old Georgia from a creep at the carnival where someone had set up him as a feature in the haunted house, and ultimately followed her family home. Georgia's daughter, Madison, is not aware of the existence of Sid, at Sid's (unexplained) insistence. The circumstances of Sid's existence are unknown, but he convinces Georgia to sneak him along to an anime convention Madison wants to attend, and sees someone he recognizes. Which sets he and Georgia to trying to figure out why, and ultimately how Sid came to be a skeleton in the first place.
The cover of the paperback says this is the first in a new series, and you can see Perry trying to set things up for future stories. Where Sid lives in the house and other accommodations the family made (such as an armoire in the living room he can lock from the inside.) The range of Sid's abilities, like being able to separate his bones but still control them. The friendship he and Georgia have, with their little quirks and rituals. Georgia's constant background anxiety about the nomadic lifestyle she's lived and subjected Madison to, as well as the thin financial margins of life as an adjunct. The parents will be back eventually, which is, bare minimum, a way to introduce new perspectives and personalities into the mix, but also could displace Georgia and Madison.
Georgia has an older sister, Deb, with a successful security company. This offers someone to give opinions about how Georgia should be living her life (find a man, publish more research so someone will give you tenure), as well as someone who knows how to pick locks. They get a dog, so Sid can have anxiety about it seeing him as the mother of all chew toys.
There's a fling with a fellow adjunct who is also a reporter, though that doesn't last past the end of the book. There's another adjunct, a friend of Georgia's, who dresses nicely but turns out to be living in the office of any professor away on sabbatical. This feels like something that could come to a head down the line, or possibly that he'll find a permanent home with Georgia and Madison (and Sid.)
Perry doesn't stay fixed on the mystery constantly, having Georgia's life - professional, parental, romantic - frequently intercede. Which is fine; it gives a sense of the life she's living, how many plates she's trying to spin. Perry also uses it as time for Sid to get up to his own investigating on the computer, so the case can advance or hit dead ends while our attention is focused elsewhere.
I am curious how many mysteries you could solve with this set-up, but if Perry has Georgia continue her adjunct life of moving from college to college (though that would probably eliminate the sister and the parents as supporting characters), I guess there could always be something new in the new location. Make it a Scooby-Doo thing, only the fright mask character is part of the crime-solving crew.
'Mom and Phil had spent quite a lot of time theorizing about his origins, deciding he was either a ghost haunting his own skeleton, a vegetarian zombie, a government project gone very wrong, or the most amazing shared delusion ever. None of the explanations stood up to scrutiny, of course, but I hadn't really cared where Sid came from, and Sid didn't seemed to, either. Sid was just. . .Sid. As I told my parents, I could always count on him, even if I couldn't account for him.'
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