It’s Halloween on Saturday so for this week’s Recommendsday I’ve got some spooky season reading for you. As ever, I had a whole list of books I was planning to read for this, and managed to only read a few of them, but a few is better than none right?
A Murder at Midnight by Ellie Alexander*
Halloween is coming in Redwood Grove and along with the rest of the town Annie and Fletcher are preparing for spooky happenings. When they get a phone call from a TV company looking to film an episode of their ghost hunting show in the bookshop it seems like great publicity – they get the Haunted Bookshop on TV on a show with a big fan base. But when a member of the crew dies, it seems like the only publicity they’ll be getting is bad, unless they can figure out who did it. This is the fourth in the Novel Detectives series but can absolutely be read standalone because there’s very little of any of the ongoing story lines in this, it’s mostly the mystery of the week. And it’s a fun set up – if you remember the Most Haunted TV show of the early 2000s this TV show will feel familiar to you and the crew working on it have plenty of tensions and rivalries to provide a motive for murderer. My favourite in this series in a while – more of this please and less of the running background stories!
Ghost Business by Jen DeLuca
This was Jen DeLuca’s new book for 2025 – the second in the Boneyard Key series. This features Sophie the ghost tour guide from Haunted Ever After and Tristan a newcomer who runs a ghost tour business and is there to open a new franchise. He’s surprised to find there’s already a ghost tour and she’s horrified that his ghost stories are made up. Then they go viral when their two tours run into each other, but both of them are actually fighting their attraction to each other. This is actually pretty gentle for a book that features an actual hurricane, and I enjoyed it although there was a bit of a case of just have a proper conversation going on at a few points in the plot, and Tristan needs to just grow a bit of a backbone! I don’t think this is the pairing that people were expecting for Sophie from book one but it did work, so I look forward to seeing what DeLuca comes up with for the next book in the series.
Scared Off by Barbara Ross
This is a novella length story that fits into the Maine Clambake series between Shucked Apart and Muddled through and sees Julia trying to solve a murder when a Halloween party her niece is at is gatecrashed by local high schoolers. If you’re following the series and haven’t read as far as Shucked Apart yet, this will give away a big plot development, so bear that in mind, but if you are (relatively) up to date, this is a nice addition to the series. The mystery is complicated enough that you don’t find the solution too fast, but not so complicated that the story feels rushed, and that’s not something that you can say about all novellas. Worth a look if you only want something short.
Happy Humpday!
