What's a Ghoul To Do by Victoria Laurie
Edition: Kindle
Pages: 281
Publisher/Date: Signet / April 3, 2007
Price: $7.99 on Amazon
Reading Challenges: Women Authors, Where Are You Reading (New York)
The Unlikely Sleuth: M.J. Holiday, a twenty-something medium and ghost hunter.
Synopsis: M.J. and her business partner, Gilly, travel to upstate New York to solve the suspicious death (ruled a suicide) for their client: the sexy, foreign Dr. Steven Sable (a.k.a. Dr. Delicious).
Plot Pace Rating: 2.5/5 - It seemed to chug along without much happening and I often found myself getting bored and wanting to skip pages – especially when M.J. goes all Long Island Medium and can’t go into a restaurant without passing on a message to someone from their deceased loved ones.
Mystery Rating: 2/5 – I felt distracted by all the subplots and minor characters that abound throughout the book. There were too many tangents and distractions, most of which didn’t really assist in solving or adding to the overall plot. The ending was anticlimactic.
Character Rating: 2.5/5 - I wanted to like M.J. – and at first I did, but she never really developed into anything. Gilley was the stereotypical gay friend, but at least he was good for a few laughs. Steven, well, I couldn’t stand him. He was underdeveloped and his accent – his mangled attempts at English colloquialisms – was written to be funny but just sounded ridiculous.
Romance Rating: 1/5 Blah. – The “romance” between M.J. and Steven made me want to soak in a vat of bleach. With both characters so one-dimensional and therefore lacking the ability to have true chemistry, all I had to go on was their interactions. Which was basically Dr. Sleazy hitting on M.J. with his fancy car and frequent linguistic faux pas (“how do ze say it, no?”). I’m not a religious person, but I found myself praying that they’d find a way to kill off (or explain away) Steven so he wouldn’t be around for the next book. (My prayers were unanswered)
The Best Part: Doc Holliday, M.J.’s smart-mouth parrot. It’s sad that the main character’s pet was my favorite part of the book, isn’t it?
And The Worst: Dr. Steven “SleazeBall” Sable. He really put the nail in the coffin for me wanting to continue this series.
Series Rating: 2.5/5 – This is the first book in the series. I wasn’t going to continue on, but I found out they were on Audible and I had some extra credits to use. I enjoyed the second plot better, but I’m still finding the same issues that I had with the first book (too many subplots).
The long review (this is one that I got to before I decided to change the format of the cozy mystery reviews)
What’s a Ghoul To Do by Victoria Laurie was one of those books that kept getting recommended to me by Goodreads and from other readers of books I like. I put it on my to-read list a while ago, but a combination of reading a few unfavorable reviews (I don’t remember what they said) and just having other books to read kept me putting it off.
Now that I’ve finally conquered it, I don’t really know how I feel. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. I don’t have anything bad to say about the writing – it was on par with other books in the genre – but, like a lot of cozy mysteries for me, it goes into the “I really wanted to like this, but…” category.
I had high hopes at the beginning: the main character, M.J. Holliday, is a ghost buster (she’s a medium and uses her abilities to help people rid themselves of unwanted entities). It’s kind of weird, but the book opens up with her helping the ghost of a rape and murder victim cross over while banishing her assailant, who was shot by the police and also died at the residence, to wherever bad spirits go (let go of logic for a moment and don’t ask too many questions).
But M.J. seemed to be pretty smart, with the snarky humor that I so love in a good female character. Plus, she had a hilarious parrot sidekick (Doc) and a gay business partner / BFF (Gilley). Of course Gilley was nothing more than a flamboyant stereotype, but at least he lightened up the mood.
The real problem came when M.J. and Gilley get hired by Dr. Stephen Sable a.k.a “Dr. Delicious” to figure out the mysterious circumstances behind his grandfather’s supposed suicide.
This is the point where the plot was supposed to be taking off, but it seemed to mosey along without much happening. For every clue discovered, there were so many more moments where something mildly spooky happens or that the characters just go off on another tangent – like M.J.’s speaking to random ghosts.
I was probably half way through the book when I realized that M.J. was becoming like a slightly less annoying version of Long Island Medium. She couldn’t go into a restaurant without having to pass on a message from some specter hovering nearby. It got old, fast.
Plus there was this whole “will they or won’t they” thing going on between M.J. and “Dr. Delicious” that seemed so forced. I get the feeling the author was going for the whole sexy, foreigner thing with Stephen, but he really just came across as an oversexed creep with a fake accent (is it bad when you hear his accent in your head as being fake – like Nadia in American Pie fake?).
Overall, it was just so-so. I genuinely did want to find out what was going to happen to the characters, but it didn’t keep me up late at night. (Note: I decided not to read the next in the series, but I found it in an audiobook format and was looking to spend an Audible credit, so I gave it a chance. I’m actually liking it better than the first book.)
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