Book 99, 2019

[chez_jae]

Waltz Macabre by Mary Bowers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Last night, I finished Waltz Macabre by Mary Bowers. It's the 9th installment in her "Tropical Breeze" mystery series, featuring Taylor Verone and Bastet, her strange cat.

Taylor's friend, Barnabas, asks her to come to his book store to help him. It's an accepted fact in Tropical Breeze that the Bookery is haunted, but Barnabas has always existed peacefully with his resident ghosts. However, a new spectre has moved in and is causing havoc with the others. Taylor refuses to believe she has anything to offer Barnabas, and she puts Edson Darby-Deaver on the case. In return, Taylor agrees to keep Ed's co-star, Teddy Force, out of his hair. To accomplish this, she invents a haunting centered around a recent murder in Tropical Breeze. The laugh is on Taylor, however, when it turns out there may be an actual haunting involved. Keeping abreast of each investigation leads Taylor to believe the hauntings are connected. Since Bastet is refusing to help her, it's up to Taylor to solve the mystery.

This story leaned towards creepy. Barnabas was obsessed with some sheet music he'd purchased at an estate sale, and his playing of it seems to have triggered all of the paranormal activity. Taylor still clings to her conviction that she is not psychic, even though she channels a deceased woman at a seance. I liked how a past murder dovetailed neatly with the current one.

Favorite lines:
♦ Whether he knows it or not, he comes back from his run looking like something that just fell out of bed in a red-hot romance novel.
♦ He had thrown his heart at her feet and she'd hopped right on and clog danced.
♦ "She's a cat. She probably laid there for hours waiting for me to wake up, just so she could scare me."
♦ The joy was too awesome to be contained by his fur, and he seemed about to burst out of it.

Very enjoyable. These books are just right for an evening or two of light reading. Four stars!