Dead Man Talking (Five Star First Edition Mystery Series)

Rating:
Summary: A fabulous holiday investigative tale
Review: In Six Gun, Texas, author Alice Carpenter has worked out the rules of sharing her home with ghosts. However, her cousin Katy Gueydon is not doing quite as well dealing with spirits and begs Alice to help her with Sir Gary Gavin. Katy's plea changes when she finds a corpse in her swimming pool at Esprit d'Chene estate. Alice calls her former spouse Detective Jack Carpenter, who works near her cousin's home, while she drives the two hours to help Katy.

Alice quickly learns that the victim is Bucky Wilson-Jones, son of a state senator. Though Bucky was a reprobate, Alice realizes that the prime suspect is her cousin, a steal magnolia who has lost her metallic backbone. As Alice investigates the current killing, tries to solve Gary's two century old "undeliberate" murder, and works with settling down a bewildered and angry Bucky, she needs help. Jack don't believe in ghosts so she turns to her mentor Twila Brown and their neighbor Granny to form the ghosthunter amateur sleuth team trying to resolve the three related scenarios.

This is a fabulous holiday investigative tale that hooks the audience the moment that readers learn of The Alice and the Howard Ghost Agreement of co-living rules. The women especially Alice and the ghosts own the plot, but readers will commiserate more with Jack the non-believer; he copes with ghost hunting females, a real murder with political implications, and some paranormal phenomena that makes him wonder what to accept as truth. Even without the Ghostbusters, readers will believe in ghosts as Alice and company act like it is a normal phenomenon, all this supernatural phenomena resides inside a delightful who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner