The Restorer (The Graveyard Queen, #1)

The Restorer
by Amanda Stevens
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781742902289
Series: The Graveyard Queen #1
Publication Date: May 6, 2023
Pages: 374
Genre: Fiction, Paranormal
Publisher: Mills and Boone

Never acknowledge the dead
Never stray far from hallowed ground
Never associate with those who are haunted
Never, ever tempt fate.

My father’s rules. I’ve never broken them…until now.

My name is Amelia Gray. I’m a cemetery restorer who sees ghosts. In order to protect myself from the parasitic nature of the dead, I’ve always held fast to the rules passed down from my father. But now a haunted police detective has entered my world and everything is changing, including the rules that have always kept me safe.

It started with the discovery of a young woman’s brutalized body in an old Charleston graveyard I’ve been hired to restore. The clues to the killer—and to his other victims—lie in the headstone symbolism that only I can interpret. Devlin needs my help, but his ghosts shadow his every move, feeding off his warmth, sustaining their presence with his energy. To warn him would be to invite them into my life. I’ve vowed to keep my distance, but the pull of his magnetism grows ever stronger even as the symbols lead me closer to the killer and to the gossamer veil that separates this world from the next.

Another LT rec, and a winner. This was some grade-A-ghost-story stuff, and in a passage or two, it toed the boundary with Horror (my definition of horror anyway). I really enjoyed the graveyard background information, and the facts involving the symbolism used on gravestones.

The plot of the mystery is a tad gruesome for my taste, although it’s not graphic at all until the end, as they get closer to identifying the murderer, and details start to emerge that I could have done without.

I thought the characters were well written and well developed and I really got engrossed in the story, and was sorry to see it end. Saying that, however, I’m not feeling confident about continuing with the series. Reading the synopsis’ and a handful of reviews for subsequent books makes me think that author is more interested in yanking her characters around emotionally than writing good, spooky mysteries. I’ll have to see how I feel as time goes on – will memories of this story draw me back in, or will they fade altogether.

NB: I rated this 4.5 stars just after I finished it; with a few days distance, I really want to nudge it back down to 4 stars and will probably do so, as I can no longer remember why I thought it was worth that extra .5 star.

The House on Tradd Street (Tradd Street, #1)

The House on Tradd Street
by Karen White
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781984802163
Series: Tradd Street #1
Publication Date: January 15, 2018
Pages: 374
Genre: Fiction, Paranormal
Publisher: Penguin Random House

The brilliant, chilling debut of Karen White's Tradd Street series, featuring a Charleston real estate agent who loves old houses—and the secret histories inside them.

Practical Melanie Middleton hates to admit she can see ghosts. But she's going to have to accept it. An old man she recently met has died, leaving her his historic Tradd Street home, complete with housekeeper, dog—and a family of ghosts anxious to tell her their secrets.

Enter Jack Trenholm, a gorgeous writer obsessed with unsolved mysteries. He has reason to believe that diamonds from the Confederate Treasury are hidden in the house. So he turns the charm on with Melanie, only to discover he's the smitten one...

It turns out Jack's search has caught the attention of a malevolent ghost. Now, Jack and Melanie must unravel a mystery of passion, heartbreak—and even murder.

My first Project LibraryThing Recommendations read and from the rating it would seem it’s not off to a great start, but that would be unfair. While I definitely had problems with the book, I enjoyed it enough to continue on with the series.

A couple of inaccuracies in the book description: chilling … not so much, and Melanie most certainly does not love historical homes. The book starts off with her having a passionate hatred for them that is simply childish, and while there are a lot of ghosts and haunted house action, I read this book at night, with the lights off, while alone in my temporary bed and not once did I feel chilled from anything other than the ridiculous weather we’ve been having. As an example of another ghost story author, Simone St. James’ books manage to put me at the edge of my seat at least once, whereas even the malevolent ghosts in Tradd Street failed to raise even a single goosebump.

I don’t really hold that against the book though. What I did have a problem with was Melanie’s emotional immaturity and stubborn refusal to grow up. I’m trying not to judge the book too harshly for this however, because she’s supposed to be emotionally stunted. Her mother abandoned her at the age of 8 and her father is a raging alcoholic, so she’s text book accurate. As someone blessed with a happy upbringing, I just found her text book behaviour tedious. I’d like to think I’d be more patient in RL with Real People.

Now, as to the story itself – it was pretty good! I enjoyed the plot involving Melanie inheriting an historic mansion and the funds to renovate it – I loved the mystery she was left with, determining what happened to the former mistress of the house, reputed to have run away with another man, and I loved, loved, loved the added search for historic treasure. The ghosts were fun, even if they failed to raise hair, and the story would have been a lot less interesting without them.

So, in spite of the problems – and anecdotal evidence from others’ reviews indicates that Melanie doesn’t grow up in a hurry – I’m looking forward to continuing with this 5 book series, and I’ve already added the first book in the spin off series to the future TBR list.

A Stitch in Time

A Stitch in Time
by Kelley Armstrong
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781989046210
Publication Date: March 1, 2021
Pages: 322
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Self-published

Thorne Manor has always been haunted…and it has always haunted Bronwyn Dale. As a young girl, Bronwyn could pass through a time slip in her great-aunt’s house, where she visited William Thorne, a boy her own age, born two centuries earlier. After a family tragedy, the house was shuttered and Bronwyn was convinced that William existed only in her imagination.

Now, twenty years later Bronwyn inherits Thorne Manor. And when she returns, William is waiting.

William Thorne is no longer the boy she remembers. He’s a difficult and tempestuous man, his own life marred by tragedy and a scandal that had him retreating to self-imposed exile in his beloved moors. He’s also none too pleased with Bronwyn for abandoning him all those years ago.

As their friendship rekindles and sparks into something more, Bronwyn must also deal with ghosts in the present version of the house. Soon she realizes they are linked to William and the secret scandal that drove him back to Thorne Manor. To build a future, Bronwyn must confront the past.

Tannat recently read this, and it has ghosts – and most importantly, cats, that feature prominently enough in the story line to make the story qualify for the Black Cat square in Bingo, so I snagged an ebook copy from my library.

It’s an easy read, well written, and totally not my jam. Ghosts or no ghosts (and there are ghosts) this is a straight up romance, with really nothing else to interfere with that romance – even the Victorian age murders didn’t detract from, or distract me from, all the love and devotion. The cats, ember and Pandora, were the stars of the show though. That they were calicos just made it even better.

While I found the story to be ‘meh’ – that’s a personal taste; to my friends that enjoy the romance genre, this is a story that might be worth checking out.

As I mentioned at the start, I needed a book for my Black Cat square for Halloween Bingo 2022, and this fits the bill perfectly, so thanks go to Tannat for saving me a lot of angst and a wild card. 🙂

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts
by Kate Racculia
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: October 8, 2019
Pages: 359
Genre: Fiction

A handsome stranger. A dead billionaire. A citywide treasure hunt. Tuesday Mooney’s life is about to change…forevermore.

Tuesday Mooney is a loner. She keeps to herself, begrudgingly socializes, and spends much of her time watching old Twin Peaks and X-Files DVDs. But when Vincent Pryce, Boston’s most eccentric billionaire, dies—leaving behind an epic treasure hunt through the city, with clues inspired by his hero, Edgar Allan Poe—Tuesday’s adventure finally begins.

Puzzle-loving Tuesday searches for clue after clue, joined by a ragtag crew: a wisecracking friend, an adoring teen neighbor, and a handsome, cagey young heir. The hunt tests their mettle, and with other teams from around the city also vying for the promised prize—a share of Pryce’s immense wealth—they must move quickly. Pryce’s clues can't be cracked with sharp wit alone; the searchers must summon the courage to face painful ghosts from their pasts (some more vivid than others) and discover their most guarded desires and dreams.

How much fun was this book? I had a blast reading it; there are very pale shades of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookshop to it, although it’s an entirely different beast. Scavenger hunts! Unsolved mysteries! Lost fortunes! Secret codes!

Enough exclamation points – it was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure with an engaging cast of characters and the closest to unreliable narrators (not really) that I can come without hating a book. The narrator is reliable, but so much of the information she gets is not. There are stories within stories and games within games and the author does a phenomenal job putting it all together in a way that doesn’t leave the reader behind. Racculia also scores points for combining brutal violence, a happy ending, and poetic justice in a way that I was willing to buy without a blink.

There was only 1 thing that left me hanging – a very minor plot point that was never addressed:

View Spoiler »

This is the kind of book you pick up when you just want to surrender a few hours to having an adventurous good time.

The Tale of Halcyon Crane

The Tale of Halcyon Crane
by Wendy Webb
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780805091403
Publication Date: March 30, 2010
Pages: 328
Genre: Fiction, Suspense
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

When a mysterious letter lands in Hallie James's mailbox, her life is upended. Hallie was raised by her loving father, having been told her mother died in a fire decades earlier. But it turns out that her mother, Madlyn, was alive until very recently. Why would Hallie's father have taken her away from Madlyn? What really happened to her family thirty years ago?

In search of answers, Hallie travels to the place where her mother lived, a remote island in the middle of the Great Lakes. The stiff islanders fix her first with icy stares and then unabashed amazement as they recognize why she looks so familiar, and Hallie quickly realizes her family's dark secrets are enmeshed in the history of this strange place. But not everyone greets her with such a chilly reception—a coffee-shop owner and the family's lawyer both warm to Hallie, and the possibility of romance blooms. And then there's the grand Victorian house bequeathed to her—maybe it's the eerie atmosphere or maybe it's the prim, elderly maid who used to work for her mother, but Hallie just can't shake the feeling that strange things are starting to happen . . .

Meh. A good story, but not a well told one. In the author’s defence, I think it’s her first book, published about 12 years ago and the only one published by Henry Holt (I believe all the rest of her books are published by an Amazon subsidiary).

The premise of the story is a gripping one: when Hallie was 5, her father faked her and his deaths, spiriting her away to the other side of the country, convincing her that her mother died in a house fire where everything was lost. He gets away with it for over 30 years, until early-onset Alzheimer’s sets in and a picture of him and Hallie end up in the newspaper honouring him for his dedicated teaching career. Her mother, thinking her dead all these years, finds out, only to write her a letter, conveniently change her will, and die of a heart attack, leaving Hallie the sole heir of a mother she thought long dead and never got to meet. A day later, her father passes too.

This is where the book begins, with Hallie heading to the island in Lake Superior, devastated and in shock and wondering why her perfect and adored father would have committed such a crime.

This is definitely a ghost story, unlike my first Wendy Webb (also the most recent, I believe). It’s just not a very spooky one, although it definitely should be; the crap that went down in that house should have made me hair stand on end. But it didn’t.

This also tries to be a romance. I like both the characters and I don’t doubt they fell in loved and lived happily ever after, but I wasn’t moved by it.

I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be an element of suspense, but I never felt suspended. I was pretty certain I knew who Iris was, and although I was correct, there is a twist at the end I didn’t anticipate at all. It should have been more shocking than it was, and instead it just left me surprised; a ‘huh’ instead of a ‘holy crap!’.

Like I said, a lot of good elements, but executed clumsily. I feel like, had this story been written by someone like Simone St. James, I’d have had to sleep with the lights on for a week. Instead, I’m not sure I’ll remember much of it by the time I go to sleep tonight.

The Sentence

The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472157003
Publication Date: November 9, 2021
Pages: 387
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Little Brown Book Group

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading 'with murderous attention,' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

What an extraordinary read. From first page to last I was awed and riveted. There was a lot of pain in this book, but Erdrich never overwhelmed the story or the reader with it; there was humor subtly woven through the words like sweetgrass, but it never took over. The angst – something I’m not normally keen to read about – was authentic, and both was and wasn’t a focus of the story.

It seems that I can only be swayed to read literary fiction when there’s a ghost involved. First Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and now The Sentence. Neither has let me down or made me regret my choice, but I think I might like The Sentence more, even though I rated it half a star lower. Lincoln in the Bardo was often difficult to read as the human condition was a little too magnified, human and on display to really enjoy it. But the structure just blew me away. The Sentence has a traditional narrative structure, and I became invested in the characters’ lives and cared what happened to them, although Tookie’s journey to prison is, while shortly told, both painful and painfully funny.

There are really two, maybe three, stories in this book. The Sentence begins with the aftermath of Flora’s death and her initial haunting of the bookshop, all of which happens in November 2019. As the season and the months progress so, too, does Flora’s haunting, seeming to focus on Tookie more than anyone else, and escalating in alarming ways.

Then as 2020 progresses into that fateful March, another story takes over – the story of the pandemic; how it crept up on people and suddenly exploded on the scene in a flurry of hand-washing, sanitisers, and food hoarding. Stay-at-home orders. Keeping the bookstore, Birchbark books open. At this point, I think, this story becomes more fictography, and Flora’s ghost fades to almost nothingness as the narrative is about surviving, staying open, staying safe.

And then George Floyd is murdered by a policeman in broad daylight. Now the story becomes a fictitious memoir, but only in the sense that the names have changed. This is the Native American perspective of the riots and it’s about as an effective narrative of the pain, anguish, anger, frustration, bitterness, hope, and need to heal as any I’ve read. It is the hardest part of the book to read.

As Minneapolis puts things back together, Flora comes back to the forefront of the plot again. These last few chapters were still beautifully written but it’s this part of the story that kept me from going to the full 5 stars. The ‘solution’ to Flora’s haunting seems suddenly abrupt; their idea for her release seems to come out of nowhere, although it’s totally in keeping with the theme of the book. The characters don’t know there’s a theme, so how did they suddenly get from what are were going to do? to wait! I know what she wants! ? There’s no progression here, so it feels bolt-of-lightning-from-the-blue-ish. And then the revelation Tookie has that does banish Flora. I know exactly what Erdrich was trying to do, and I know exactly to what earlier part of the story she was trying to tie it to, but it was clumsily done. I was left floundering for several paragraphs, and even when the ‘denouement’ came, it failed to have the emotional impact it should have had – I feel Erdrich missed a step that kept the reader from feeling the full power of the gut punch we’re meant to feel.

It doesn’t really matter though – this is a read that will remain with me, and one I want to talk about with everybody I come into contact with. A damn good story.

The Haunting of Maddy Clarie

The Haunting of Maddy Clare
by Simone St. James
Rating: ★★★★★
isbn: 9780451235688
Publication Date: March 6, 2012
Pages: 330
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: NAL / New American Library

Wow.

I put this book on my ‘maybe’ list well over a year ago and then promptly overlooked it for ages. I even gave up and removed it from my lists altogether because I figured if I hadn’t bought it yet, I wasn’t really interested.

A recent review here on BL highly rating it brought it back to my attention at the same time I received a coupon from my favorite online bookseller so I just ordered it.

Jeez am I glad I did. I loved this book. This book hit all the right buttons for me: it was scary without being terrifying; it had great sexual tension (I am not going to call it ‘romance’ because there wasn’t any romancing going on, but it was intense); it had a great plot and interesting characters and it was well-written. The writing style reminded me of authors of the past, particularly Phyllis Whitney.

My only complaint is now I’m suffering from a book hangover – right before I leave for a long weekend at the beach.