Off the Shelf: Paranormal Mystery Series and the Newset Installment
By Sharon Saye on November 08, 2017 from Off the Shelf via Connect-Bridgeport.com
Darynda Jones is the author of a popular series of paranormal mysteries starring Charley Davidson. Charley is a private investigator with quite a few secrets. Her uncle is a police officer who knows one of her secrets and often calls her in on cases. Charley can talk to the dead, a very useful skill when investigating murders. What her family and friends don’t realize initially is that Charley is the Grim Reaper. Anyone who does not cross over initially at death has to pass through Charley to proceed to the afterlife.
So Charley is surrounded by dead people that only she can hear; often they stay because of unresolved issues, sometimes they have a mission. Not all of them want to talk, but usually when the victim of a crime, they are willing to tell their story and when they do cross over, Charley sees their entire life.
This situation may be helpful as a private investigator, but Charley gets very skilled at misdirection. So regular people think she is talking on the phone when she is really conversing with a ghost. Being the Grim Reaper brings with it a bunch of enemies including Satan who thinks that subverting her messes up all of heaven’s design. His son, Reyes, has been planted on earth to help Satan achieve his goal, but Charley just knows the boy is innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and works to free him. Over several books, their attraction grows until they are married and have a baby.
In “The Trouble with Twelfth Grave,” Charley is caught in a serious bind. In the previous book, “Eleventh Grave in Moonlight” she had to send her husband into another dimension, but not only does he return not quite himself, but so does a centuries-old priest on a mission of death against anyone who can sense the supernatural. And on top of this end-of-the-world stuff, Charley has to solve a case involving a recently dead criminal killed by an old friend of hers.
So between helping her uncle with a series of dead women, trying to persuade everyone that the demon that looks like her husband still has good in him and convincing Amber and Quentin that maybe detective work isn’t for them, she has to cope with the Angel Michael, missing ghost-friends, an FBI crime probe, and the Army of God.
“The Trouble with Twelfth Grave” is packed full of humor from its very start right up to its cliff-hanger ending. Nothing ever goes quite right for Charley, but with her humor and her friends, she just barrels straight ahead. This makes the entire series a fun read with great characters, situations, and non-stop humor.
