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I honestly have no idea. I have no idea how Ghostly Interests by Lily Harper Hart came across my path. One weekend morning I decided to give it a go. It was a good read for the $0.99 I paid for it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it but it was a pleasurable way to pass the time.

Hart has a good plot in Ghostly Interests. I’m a total sucker for ghost communicating mystery solvers, male or female. That alone caught my interest. If you like books that have secondary characters living out their lives in the hereafter this is a decent read. There was only one ghostly character and the mystery was to find her killer. There were several good suspects and the mystery ended up being pretty good. I figured it out right before the reveal. That’s pretty good. I don’t want a mystery where I have it pegged a quarter of the way through the book. Then it just isn’t any fun. It was a fairly quick read.

Characters are where the story flagged for me a little bit. At times I really enjoyed them and at other times they irritated the crap out of me. The maturity level seemed like a roller coaster with it’s ups and downs. One minute Harper was a level-headed female lead who co-operated her own business and then this same girl would do something so completely illogical that it made you think twice. The perfect example would be entering the victim’s house at night with their afterlife permission after being told to back off the case by a cop who doesn’t believe in her powers. It works to advance the plot but at the cost of making Harper look less than intelligent. I know I’m probably being overly picky but these are things that stick out to me as a mystery reader. Another reader pet peeve is when an author uses a phrase too much. Everyone was “dead panning”. I ‘ll see this phrase occasionally in other books but it seemed like there were a ton in this book.

I haven’t decided if I want to continue the series or not. Maybe that should be my indication? I hate not finishing a series…I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Ghostly Interests is a good mystery but its characters lacked for me.