Installment Immortality is the 14th mainline* novel in Seanan McGuire's InCryptid urban fantasy series: which follows the Price/Healy family as they attempt to safeguard Cryptids (creatures not believed by science) from the monster hunting Covenant of St. George and other often inhuman threats. This is also the second novel to center around former Crossroads ghost Mary Dunlavy, as she figures out who she is after the death of the Crossroads and the explosive events of the last book. As people should know, I'm a rather big fan of this series, so I managed to grab this book to read despite being way way behind on my TBR, although I have mixed feelings about how dire events in the series have gotten the last few books.
*McGuire releases InCryptid short stories on her Patreon, and one of those short stories was itself a novel, hence me using the word "mainline" to not mess with the count.
And I really liked Installment Immortality for the most part as it took the characters' struggling with some pretty tragic events, trauma and grief, and managed to examine it at the same time it also managed to give us some of the better parts of InCryptid: the encounters with the different Cryptid communities (in this case also some of the ghost communities) and how they work and survive in a human dominant world. In some ways it felt like a Rose Marshall book at times with its focus on the various types of ghosts (not really a problem for me), and the attached novella dealing with a spoiler character's grief over last book also worked really well. InCryptid fans will enjoy this one and people who haven't tried out the series will only have more reason to (although do NOT start here).
Spoilers for book 13 - Aftermarket Afterlife - and earlier books are below, so if you haven't read those books, be FOREWARNED. Also, this is not a good place to start this series, which has a few earlier jumping on points (Books 1, 3, and 6 work well in particular, plus online short stories).