Name: Night of the Loving Dead
ISBN: 9780425225554

Casey Daniels

Pepper Martin, a heiress-turned-cemetery-tour guide who can communicate with ghosts, finds her business trip to Chicago taking an otherworldly turn when the specter of Madeline, a young woman in a lab coat, needs her help in warning Dr. Dan Callahan that his life is in danger. Original.

Night of the Loving Dead

Jacalyn Boggs

Night of the Loving Dead is the fourth installment of the Pepper Martin series that I began reading about a month ago. To summarize, Pepper is a down on her luck debutante type. After her fiance dumps her following Pepper’s father’s incarceration for medicare fraud, she begins working as a tour guide in a Cleveland cemetery. Following an unfortunate accident involving a head injury against a tombstone, Pepper discovers she can see dead people.

And she’s none-too-thrilled.

For the record, I think Pepper is an insanely fun main character. Talking to dead people? Huge pain in the Jimmy Choos. This, however, was not my favourite of the series. Don’t get me wrong, it was OK. I just didn’t find myself loving it as much as the first three. I think this has everything to do with the ghost being boring in comparison.

The first three books involved a Don murdered in a drive-by, an author of a book that was far too Gone With the Wind, and a famous rock star. These three scenarios kept me in stitches. So a vengeful dowdy ghost who wanted to try to get her life back by possessing Pepper? It just couldn’t compare.

Now the “live people” side of the story? It was the winner. I loved the convention angle and only wish we saw more of that. We got wonderful back story on the mysterious Dan. We even got to see Pepper finding a way to save the homeless of Chicago from a fate worse than being homeless! (The scene with her in the refrigerator box – almost as priceless as her struggling to not freak out while working in the soup kitchen. Oh no! She broke a nail!)

Supernatural cozy novels just add that extra fun to your typical cozy mystery. You can get even more hijinks on the part of the amateur sleuth. The Pepper Martin series gives you all of the typical “solve it first” muddling about with zany ghost stories and lots of graveyard walking. Who doesn’t like a good walk through the graveyard at night?

Night of the Loving Dead

Reviews

Highlights