Cleo Coyle

Penelope Thornton-McClure and her bookshop's ghost-in-residence Jack Shepard are back on a new case in this delightful paranormal mystery from New York Times bestselling author Cleo Coyle. A big bestseller leads to small town trouble. Bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure didn't believe in ghosts, until she was haunted by the hard-boiled spirit of 1940s private investigator Jack Shepard. Now Jack is back on the job, and Pen is eternally grateful... After an elegant new customer has a breakdown in her shop, Penelope suspects there is something bogus behind the biggest bestseller of the year. This popular potboiler is so hot that folks in her tiny Rhode Island town are dying to read it--literally. First one customer turns up dead, followed by another mysterious fatality connected to the book, which Pen discovers is more than just fiction. Now, with the help of her gumshoe ghost, Pen must solve the real-life cold case behind the bogus bestseller before the killer closes the book on her.

The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller

Sarah Sammis

** spoiler alert **
           Ignoring the ghostly PI, the mystery's structure reads like a mixture of Coached in the Act by Victoria Laurie (2021) and Ghostal Living by Kathleen Bridge (2017). This is a mystery that requires the reader keep three timelines separate in their head if they want to solve the mystery before the main character.

As with the previous books in this series, I have been listening to them as audiobooks. Early on Jack had many more first person scenes than he does in more recent volumes. In The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller, Jack's only first person scene is the prolog. Yet, for reasons that escape me, the man hired to read Jack's prolog is also given the epilog to read. The problem: the epilog is clearly written from Pen's point of view!

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2022/comm...

Diana

This was still just as fun as the others in the series, however I am ready for Pen to start making some progress with Jack's death. I feel like there keep being hints that she will look into his death and that ultimately she will solve it, but practically nothing has been done yet. Maybe now that the series has started back up, that plotline will be able to move forward. Even with that complaint, this is still one of my favorite cozy mystery series and by far my favorite that has a ghost.

The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller

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