Book Review: “Merry, Merry Ghost”
Yes, I’m fully aware that this is September. Christmas isn’t for months. The temperature in the beautiful Black Hills last week reached the upper 90s.
Sounds like a great time to pick up a winter book, doesn’t it?
Okay, maybe most people wouldn’t select a book set in late December as their summer beach reading, but I did.
Merry, Merry, Ghost by Carolyn Hart is the second of the paranormal cozies featuring Bailey Ruth MacNeill, a heavenly emissary who returns to her former hometown of Adelaide, Oklahoma, in an effort to help people out.
Bailey Ruth is a spunky, free-thinking woman with a heart of gold. She is one of those souls who truly wishes to help people, even if that means breaking the rules. I imagine her motto is something like “the ends always justify the means.”
That’s not to say she doesn’t suffer the consequences. Wiggins, who is in chard of Heaven’s Department of Good Intentions, has laid out a number of precepts for emissaries to follow (he hates the term ghost), and Bailey Ruth manages to break them all: from allowing humans to see her to conversing with the recently departed.
In Merry, Merry Ghost, Bailey Ruth is dispatched to protect a young boy. Keith, an orphan, is dropped off at his grandmother’s estate in Adelaide right before Christmas. Bailey Ruth’s job is to protect him until his grandmother can have her will changed to include him. Unfortunately, a murderer decides that sharing the inheritance isn’t a good idea and offs the grandmother before the will can be signed.
This leads Bailey Ruth on a mission. She takes the role of Keith’s protector seriously and does whatever it takes to ensure his future, which actually causes the bending (if not breaking) of a number of Wiggins’ precepts.
I’ve read the first in this series—Ghost at Work—and enjoyed it, so I had high hopes for the sequel. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a quick read and Hart combines the mystery with the supernatural, and just a hint of the past.
Nichole
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