A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Catching a Killer
Cosy crime and cosy ghosts? I’m not sure they go together. A whodunnit solved by supernatural intervention is surely cheating. A murder mystery is essentially a battle of wits between the sleuth and the killer, giving the reader a chance to get to the solution first.
Actually, ghosts play a very limited role in A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Catching a Killer, which is a very well-crafted murder mystery with an unusual twist and some interesting sub-plots. The ghosts feature in the story only because the principal investigator is Miss Alma Timperley, owner of the Timperley Spiritualist Hotel in Falmouth, Cornwall. She is a clairvoyant, and most of her guests come to the hotel for the chance to communicate with their lost loved ones. Since the year is 1915, there is no shortage of bereaved families.
On the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, the hotel chambermaid discovers one of the guests dead in bed, smothered by her pillow. The short-handed local police (not the usual bunch of incompetents) recruit Alma to help them solve the case. This she does using her detective skills, rather than her supernatural gifts.
The story ticks all the right boxes. The sub-plots, rather than distracting from the main story as they so often do, add to the characterisation and sense of place. Alma’s hotel clearly has more than its share of mysterious deaths (this is the second in the Miss Timperley series), so we can look forward to more of her investigations.
