An Enchanting Case of Spirits by Melissa Holtz mixes a little bit of sleuthing with spirits who have unfinished business. Sprinkle a little bit of romance on top, and we have this new spirited mystery from Berkley Publishing.
Synopsis
When a fortieth birthday celebration leads to a ghostly visitor, four friends find themselves navigating surprising mysteries and spiritual hijinks, in this clever debut from Melissa Holtz.
Alyssa Mann isn’t adventurous, not since her husband died and she found herself the single mom of a teenage daughter. But there’s no way to avoid celebrating the big 4-0, so when her best friends drag her out for drinks and a tarot reading, she throws caution to the wind and decides to see what the spirits have to say. It’s all fun and games, until she wakes up the next morning with a wicked hangover—and a ghost perched on the edge of her bed.
Sheer panic sends her running to get help from Nick West, the (very attractive) detective who lives next door. When he finds no one inside, Alyssa has to accept that she really did see a ghost. As the dearly departed keep appearing, Alyssa and her friends do their best to learn how to control her newfound power. Trading insults with ghosts, tracking down family heirlooms, and getting closer to the skeptical but helpful Nick is more fun than Alyssa imagined. But when looking into one ghost’s past reveals unexpected—and unwelcome—facts about Alyssa’s late husband’s death, she discovers she just may be in over her head.
Book Review
In An Enchanting Case of Spirits, Alyssa’s medium powers awaken during a tarot reading and things will never be the same again for her or her friends. In this comedic ride with a psychic helping spirits with unfinished business move on (mainly, because she wants them out of her life), we discover that these spirits all have one thing in common (besides being dead). Unbeknownst to any of them, they all have a reason why they are flocking to Alyssa, and it is not just because she’s a medium now. It’s because she also has a connection to their deaths.
Alyssa and her friends (plus throw in the tarot card reader that sparked Alyssa’s newfound power) band together to help unravel what happened to these ghosts. Nick West (the hot homicide detective living next door) can’t really help them because his captain closed these case files after feeling pressure from the mayor.
Alyssa can’t stand her neighbor, but in the enemies-to-lovers trope, you know she’ll eventually change her mind. Both characters come from a background of loss. Alyssa’s husband died in a car accident. Nick’s fiancée died from cancer. In time, their attraction to each other takes over after all of her requests for help brings them together, even if he can’t believe she sees ghosts.
But Nick starts to believe after a girl goes missing and she is able to give him details on where she can be found. That case that he was told to close, it ends up that she can do something to uncover the truth behind not just that one case, but multiple cases. While he may hate that she is becoming an amateur sleuth, he can’t help but think that maybe he should listen to what she has to say, despite her strange way of obtaining information.
I enjoyed this book. There were a lot of laugh out loud moments with the ghosts providing comic relief to Alyssa’s predicament. I was happy at the end when I discovered this may be the beginning of this story. I actually felt like screaming, “YES!” We’re getting a book two.
Sleuthing friends where the ghosts are helping them with their own unfinished business, what’s not to love? What they’re getting themselves into though is pretty dangerous and could cost them their own lives. So yes, there is a bit of a scare element in this mystery.
If you like the show Ghosts, you will definitely love this book.
An Enchanting Case of Spirits is out now. You can order a copy through the Bookshop.org or Amazon Bookshop link in the Shop menu above.