Phantom Pains cover art

Phantom Pains

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Phantom Pains

By: Mishell Baker
Narrated by: Arden Hammersmith
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 In this sequel to the Nebula Award–nominated and Tiptree Award Honor Book that New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire called “exciting, inventive, and brilliantly plotted,” Millie unwillingly returns to the Arcadia Project when an impossible and deadly situation pulls her back in.

Four months ago, Millie left the Arcadia Project after losing her partner Teo to the lethal magic of an Unseelie fey countess. Now, in a final visit to the scene of the crime, Millie and her former boss Caryl encounter Teo’s tormented ghost. But there’s one problem: according to Caryl, ghosts don’t exist.

Millie has a new life, a stressful job, and no time to get pulled back into the Project, but she agrees to tell her side of the ghost story to the agents from the Project’s National Headquarters. During her visit though, tragedy strikes when one of the agents is gruesomely murdered in a way only Caryl could have achieved. Millie knows Caryl is innocent, but the only way to save her from the Project’s severe, off-the-books justice is to find the mysterious culprits that can only be seen when they want to be seen. Millie must solve the mystery not only to save Caryl, but also to foil an insidious, arcane terrorist plot that would leave two worlds in ruins. Fantasy Modern Detectives Mystery Supernatural Thriller & Suspense Ghost Magic Fiction Haunted Paranormal

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Borderline cover art
Grave Mistake cover art
Stone and a Hard Place cover art
A Thousand Pieces of You cover art
Seven Kinds of Hell cover art
Of Ash and Spirit: A Curse Keepers Novel cover art
Stone Cold Magic cover art
Bookburners: Book 1 cover art
Prelude to Mayhem cover art
Kiss Me Deadly cover art
Light From Uncommon Stars cover art
Crystal Magic cover art
Urban Legends cover art
Zeus, Inc. cover art
Empty Threat cover art
The Rule of Luck cover art
All stars
Most relevant
I bought the first in this series, 'Borderline' on the basis of reviews which advised that if listeners were wary of the supernatural 'fey' half of this genre mash up the characters and thriller elements were so well done it would still delight. This is true of the second in the series, but less so. Our intriguing, damaged heroine is still compelling but a much larger part of this second instalment is spent establishing the rules of the imaginary magical world. There are great screeds of exposition of fairy and mystical physics and history which often go on for some time in the middle of action sequences and are sometimes spelled out twice as one character then repeats them again for another. One can sense a complicated moral story and metaphor is being built up here in this basically enjoyable set of books but the intricacies started to feel a tad over complicated and demanding on the reader's patience. I will probably go for the third in the series and the performance of the reader is excellent, but I hope some of the snap and contemporary originality of the first returns.

Still engaging

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
what can you do with a fairy story pitched into 1950s cold war logic? stop listening is my recommendation, now as then.

starts well. descends into propaganda.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.