Reading about dead debutante’s is not exactly the way to lose weight fast. I mean, skinny rich girls, even when they’re corpses, are hardly good role models. Fortunately, I don’t read Alice Kimberly’s haunted bookshop novels for fitness inspiration, but to be entertained, and this book succeeded wildly in its humble mission.

In this, the third outing for Penelope McClure and the ghost of Jack Shepherd, we have drug abuse, fickle lovers, fashionistas, and, of course, a mystery of how one pretty rich girl became the latest in a pair of connected murders.

As always, while the mystery is enjoyable, the developing Jack/Pen relationship is why I read, and in this installment the friendship between ghost and bookseller continues to deepen.

Am I the only person wishing a haunted bookshop was in my neighborhood?

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

I’m not sure if having a live-in ghost is something that will remove the necessity of having good, cheap life insurance, but I do know that I’m really enjoying Alice Kimberly’s Haunted Bookshop series. It’s the relationship between Pen and Jack that has me inhaling these books, and also the fact that light reading is nice during the holidays.

In any case, here’s my teaser, from page 192 of book three, The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library.

Picking a lock is an art. You can’t master it in a few minutes.

“So how do I get in?”

Break the window and turn the knob from the other side.

“Okay.” I raised the Maglite to smash the glass.

Not like that! Jack cried. With finesse. And real quiet like.

“How do you break a window quietly?”

I should note that in the above passage, lines in italics are the words of Jack, the ghost.

The Ghost and Mrs. McClureThe Ghost at Mrs. Muir and part homage to noir crime fiction, this book is a light mystery – nothing is terribly unpredictable, but the relationship between Jack and Pen makes it an interesting read, and keeps you coming back for more. Some of the best humor of the book comes from Jack’s reactions to modern technology – chat rooms on the internet are as cool to him as websites touting low cost health insurance would be to those looking for new policies.

I suspect future novels will see the Pen/Jack relationship deepening – as far as it’s possible when one half of the relationship is incorporeal, but that the basic premise will be maintained: He’s the ghost of a hard-boiled detective, she’s a widowed bookseller. Together, they fight crime.

Worse, I lost a book I promised to review, while I was in the middle of reading it. The book in question is Whom God Would Destroy, by Commander Pants, which I posted a teaser from sometime in the last month or so. It was really enjoying it, because it was making me think AND making me laugh – a combination which I generally cannot resist.

I have this horrible feeling it got slipped into a stack of shipping boxes (incoming, not outgoing) and is upstairs in the library, buried in a pile, but I looked, and don’t remember seeing it.

Speaking of boxes, however, I have found something to read in the meanwhile: The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, by Alice Kimberly. This is the first in Kimberly’s “Haunted Bookshop” series, and I know it will be good because I know that Alice Kimberly is also Cleo Coyle, who writes the Coffeehouse Mysteries I love so much.

I’m enjoying this book a lot, but I’d rather find the other, and finish it, before moving on entirely.