In Dead and Breakfast by Kate Kingsbury, Melanie West is busy preparing an old house with her grandmother, Lisa Harris, to turn it into the Merry Ghost Inn, named after the ghost who laughs at people. While working hard to renovate the house in time for their first guests, Melanie and Liza work to scrape the wallpaper off one room and discover a secret hidden door. Upon pushing it open, Liza discovers a skeleton dressed in a nightgown. Since the Oregon coastal town where they have settled is too small to have its own detective, sharing one man with several other nearby towns, Liza talks Melanie into working to solve the murder because they won’t be allowed to access the upstairs until the police solve the murder. This means they won’t be able to open on time.
Dead and Breakfast turned out to be a fun, lighthearted book to listen to. The characters are cute and the scenes of interest. It is not deep in its clues, but Melanie and Liza help to make up for that. There are not many other characters besides those two, and I wish we could see more people because of the life we see in this pair. There is also an element of gentle love interests between Melanie and Officer Ben Carter as well as between the widowed Liza and the man who runs the hardware store/ local restaurant in town.
Tavia Gilbert performs the audio edition of this book. Her gentle voice seems well suited to the gentle plot, and she does a good job of making the book seem real. I like the way she softens the British accent of Liza, who moved to the U.S. in the 1960s so had plenty of time to pick up elements of an American accent. The voice of the laughing ghost, whom Liza dubs Orville, also shows a lot of. Creativity. I think Gilbert does an excellent job with this narration.
In general, I enjoyed Dead and Breakfast, but I did feel that it was weak in its content. I would have liked more clues and possible suspects, as well as more characters. But the book still had a lot of fun details, so I give it four stars.
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