A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder: A Ghost Hunter Mystery (Ghost Hunter Mystery, #10)

by Victoria Laurie

Medium M. J. Holliday battles demons in the tenth Ghost Hunter Mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of No Ghouls Allowed.

M.J., Heath, and Gilley, are back home in Boston, where their new film is sure to be a monster hit!  To promote the film, the studio is sponsoring a special exhibit of supernatural artifacts at a local museum. Unfortunately, Gilley—whose mind is engaged with wedding plans—gets talked into donating to the exhibit the very dagger that keeps the dangerous ghost Oruç and his pet demon locked down in the lower realms. Before M.J. can recover the bewitched blade, there’s a murder and a heist at the museum, and the dagger is stolen.
 
Now Oruç is coming for M.J. and her crew, and he's bringing with him some fiendish friends from M.J.’s haunted past. She, Gilley, and Heath are certain to be in for a devil of a time. M.J. may even need to recruit a certain skeptical Boston detective to help stop the paranormal party crashers from turning Gilley’s wedding bells to funeral knells. . . .

• ISBN10: 0451470125
• ISBN13: 9780451470126
• Publish Date: 5 January 2016
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: New American Library
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780451470126

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

Another final book of a series.  At first I was pretty wrenched hearing this - another of my favourite reads going to that big library in the sky!  But actually, I'm ok with it; while the stories were always deliciously creepy – just stopping short of too-scary-for-me – the plot lines were getting more 'out there' with every book.  I just don't think she could have actually taken the series any further without bringing aliens or satan into it.

As M.J.'s swan song, A Ghoul's Guide to Love and Murder serves as a 'This is Your Life': an artefact from a previous adventure is stolen from Heath and M.J. and the gateway it contains now opens enough to allow several of the spooks from their past to all come through at once.  I'm generally not a fan of this plot device but in this book I think it was especially ineffective and here's why:  what made each of the ghouls in the books so freaking scary was not only what they looked like and what they did, but the setting each one haunted and the super-creepy story behind their existence.  Here, they're pulled out of their natural environments and so become something more akin to a character in a generic haunted house.  They're still scary as hell, but they loose a lot of their creep and spook factors.

Still, the pacing is fast, the action pretty much constant and all our characters get their HEA (actually, they pretty much get that in the first chapter, it's just that by the end of the book you know they'll get to keep it).  These books will have a home on my shelves for a long time to come and when I'm in the mood for a spooky ghost story, they'll be my first choice.