Ghost at Work by Carolyn Hart: A review

This bit of Halloween fluff was October's reading selection for my Mystery Book Club. It was a quick and easy read - nothing to pause and ruminate over here.

Bailey Ruth Raeburn is long-dead and happily ensconced in Heaven with her beloved Bobby Mac. She and Bobby Mac had their tickets punched for the Pearly Gates when they went down with their boat in a storm on the Gulf. Now Bailey Ruth is hoping to make herself useful as an employee of Heaven's Department of Good Intentions. (But, wait a minute, doesn't that road lead...oh, never mind!)

Bailey Ruth - it's always Bailey Ruth, never just Bailey or Ruth - meets with the Ticketmaster Wiggins and he gives her an assignment. She is to go as an "emissary" (for which, read "ghost") to the town of Adelaide, Oklahoma, which just happens to be her earthly home town. There she is to help a local clergyman's wife, who turns out to be BR's (I just can't keep writing Bailey Ruth) relation. The clergyman's wife has just found a dead body on her porch. Moreover, it is the body of a man whom she disliked and maybe had reason to want dead.

Soon, BR arrives on the scene, and, both seen and unseen, proceeds to destroy evidence, move bodies, and generally muck up the investigation by the local police. She is a perky, red-headed busybody, whom one witness to whom she appeared described as "drop-dead gorgeous." (Curiously, all of the beautiful people in this book seem to be redheads. I guess Adelaide is overrun with them.)

Anyway, the story is a romp, a hoot. It's not something about which I can be serious. I must confess I'm not familiar with Carolyn Hart's work, although she seems to have a large body of it. This book did not particularly make me want to become better acquainted with it

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