Quick Take
- Voice: Jake Stormoen holds the only reading credit on this page; run the opening minutes before committing to a series entry this brief.
- Big ideas: Ghost brokering as a trade, Victorian social status, a guarded identity, serial suspense.
- Atmosphere: Brisk and companionable, more parlor than graveyard.
- Worth it?: Excellent for readers already three books deep, awkward as a first stop.
Book three of the Mercury Raine series runs two hours and twenty-seven minutes, which makes this audiobook an evening rather than a commitment. What the listing packs into that short file is not small: ghosts treated as property, a broker who trades in them, a protagonist whose identity is a guarded secret and whose own past is a mystery to him. Sarah M. Eden has been building the world across two earlier installments, and Pineway Books released this one on March 10, 2026, with both a series name and a series number filled in, which is more than most listings manage.
Stormoen Alone Separates the Living From the Dead
The publisher's paragraphs do something unusual with exposition, and the seams show. Mercury has spent his entire life surrounded by ghosts, so little about them can surprise him any longer; his identity is closely guarded; the fortifications around his heart have started to crack for the first time. Every one of those sentences describes what Mercury withholds rather than what a buyer needs to know, and the copy never once explains the trade the whole series turns on. It is elegant marketing for people already inside the story and close to useless for anyone standing outside it.
Jake Stormoen is the only name in the narrator field, and on a book where the dead outnumber the living in most rooms, that is the production decision worth weighing before you buy. A pub scene crowded with specters asks a listener to keep track of who is corporeal and who is not, with no second performer to mark the difference and no page to glance back at. One reader has to build that separation out of pitch and pacing, and in a file this short the establishing work has to land inside the first few minutes or not at all.
The most useful thing written anywhere under this listing comes from the response that describes the trade itself: ghost brokering as a profession, an alternate Victorian England in which what matters to the ton is owning the most fashionable ghost, and multiple ghosts counting as a boon. That same account places this installment immediately after the previous one, with a character named Tacey learning the art. The publisher's copy skips every bit of that, and every bit of it is what a buyer actually needs in order to know what kind of book has been put in front of them.
Marketed as Menace, It Reads as Comedy
Register is the thing this page gets wrong about its own book. The description reads as menace: a threat to be minimized, a phantom who poses danger, something that began as merely complicated proving deeply dangerous instead. The response filed four days after release describes a different experience altogether, a story where you meet more ghosts, learn more secrets and laugh along the way, with the suspense building toward a next installment the same reader is already impatient for. Comic Victorian fantasy with a serial hook is a very different purchase from the gothic threat the paragraphs advertise, and the second description is the one that comes from someone who finished it.
Length is the other argument, and it is a stronger one than it looks. A shade under two and a half hours is roughly the span of a film, and a serialized fantasy that delivers an installment inside that window offers something the doorstop series cannot: you learn whether the world works for you before you have spent a working week finding out. Series readers get a chapter-sized dose at a chapter-sized cost. Anyone who has abandoned a long first volume a third of the way in will recognize why a series that asks for one evening at a time is easier to say yes to.
One Review Just Quotes the Publisher, Then Stops
One of the written responses on this page is not a review at all. Its body reproduces the publisher's own opening paragraphs almost word for word, from Mercury's lifetime among ghosts through the Violet Giant drifting into the pub, prefaced by the author's social handle and a row of star emoji, then breaks off mid-word inside a quotation it was apparently about to share. Whatever value that entry has, it is not an independent judgment of anything, and it makes the column thinner than its apparent length suggests.
Category placement is the other thing likely to mis-sort a buyer. The genre array files this under literature and fiction alongside mystery, thriller and suspense, with a single Historical Fiction tag, and the word ghost appears nowhere in any of it. Somebody browsing historical mysteries will arrive at a Victorian fantasy in which the dead are property and a broker's client list is a social asset. The book is not hiding what it is. The shelf is doing that for it.
Series position is the practical warning. This behaves exactly like the third volume it is, resuming a thread about ghost brokering that began elsewhere, with a protagonist whose secret has presumably been the engine of all three. Neither the copy nor the fields explain the rules of the trade, and at this runtime the file has no room to stop and catch anyone up. Starting here is possible. Starting here and feeling the weight of a heart cracking open for the first time, which is what the copy promises, is a different proposition entirely.
This Fantasy Prefers a Pub to a Moor
Readers already inside this series are the obvious audience, and everything about the file is built for them, from the resumed thread to a runtime that treats an installment as a single sitting. Beyond that circle, it fits anyone who wants Victorian fantasy where the supernatural is domestic rather than terrifying, ghosts as property and status rather than as haunting, a public house rather than a moor. It also suits listeners who like their fiction short and finished, and who would rather buy four two-hour books than one eight-hour one.
Newcomers to Mercury Raine get the least out of this one, and the remedy costs nothing: begin at book one and come back. Anyone shopping for a mystery in the ordinary sense is in the wrong aisle, since the puzzle here is a supernatural economy rather than a crime. Value measured in hours will make the runtime either the best or the worst thing about this purchase, depending almost entirely on whether Mercury is already familiar.
How long is the Twenty and One audiobook, and is it a full novel?
Two hours and twenty-seven minutes, which is short for a third series entry and closer in length to a film than to a novel. The listing marks it as an installment rather than a standalone, and the copy points forward toward whatever comes next rather than closing anything off.
Do I need the earlier Mercury Raine books before this audiobook?
The series field marks it book three, and the copy assumes you already know what a ghost broker is and why Mercury's past matters. Nothing on the page explains how the profession works. You can follow events from here, but the emotional stakes the description promises will land considerably harder in order.
Who published Twenty and One and when was the recording released?
Pineway Books put it out in March 2026, with Jake Stormoen credited as reader and Sarah M. Eden on the byline. The page fills in the series fields, which many listings leave blank, so at least you can see where this installment sits before committing to it.
Does the Twenty and One audiobook work as an introduction to Sarah M. Eden?
It is a poor sample of any writer, not because of quality but because of position. This is a mid-series installment of well under three hours, made for people who already know the world. A first-time listener meeting Eden here is meeting a chapter rather than a book.
