A New Lease on Death: 03/10/24

A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke, Stefanie Kay and Petrea Burchard (Narrators) (2024) is the start of the Supernatural Mysteries series. Cordelia Graves is a ghost who is sticking around her Boston apartment because she doesn't know what else to do. Ruby Young is the new tenant and she needs all the help she can get. But what brings them together is the murder of their across the hall neighbor Jake Macintyre.

The novel is set up like the early books in the Haunted Bookshop mystery series when they were by Alice Kimberley instead of Cleo Coyle (different nom de plumes of the same writing team), where the ghost and the living sleuth trade off on who is the POV character. The difference here is that both characters are women and they are contemporaries, though of different generations. So we don't get the genre whiplash as the book flips from cozy to hardboiled mystery.

We're introduced to the murder victim in the first chapter when he is temporarily there as a ghost. There are rules for how being a ghost works and like God in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you don't believe, you cease be. Poof. The opening chapter and conversation between the two ghosts gives the reader everything that's needed to solve the mystery.

What keeps the book interesting is waiting for Cordelia and Ruby to figure out ways of communicating. As with Haunted Ever After by Jen DeLuca (2024), refrigerator magnets are one of the solutions they come up with. Also Ruby has her own problems to solve, like finding a job and having money to eat.

I think this first volume is intentionally an easy one to allow time for character and world building. Now that we know Cordelia and Ruby and how being a ghost works, I suspect later mysteries will be more complicated.

The next book is Death at the Door which releases October 21, 2025.

Five stars

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