Former CIA assassin Fortune Redding returns to entertain and excite listeners in Swamp Spook by Jana Deleon. Halloween has come to Sinful, Louisiana, and Fortune finds herself recruited to play the executioner at the haunted maze, a role particularly suited to her. In it, she brandishes an axe and pretends to chop off the head of a person in the form of a dummy. But after the break in the middle of the maze event, Fortune returns to her position to find the body of a real man with his head cut off.
Things in the case get stranger and stranger, and Fortune’s arch enemy, Celia Arceneaux, brings in the state police, with accusations against Fortune as the murderer and Deputy Carter Leblanc as unable to handle the case because he is dating the chief suspect. Since Carter finds himself sidelined completely, even after Fortune is vindicated, he takes a move he never dreamed he’d ever make: He hires Fortune, with Ida Bell and Gertie, to use their detection agency to get to the bottom of the case.
Swamp Spook is a delightful addition to the Miss Fortune mystery series. With characteristic humor, Deleon gives us a further view of Sinful and its quirky residents. I enjoyed the creative plot and its great twists and turns, with some significant surprises for us readers. The Swamp Team 3 trio of Fortune, Ida Bell, and Gertie find new creative ways of detecting and getting themselves into and sneakily out of trouble.
Cassandra Campbell returns to perform the audio edition of this book. As with all the books in this series, Campbell does an excellent job of making this book delightful to listen to. She makes Fortune seem a very real person, a woman we would love to meet face to face and not just in the book. With excellent voices for each of the characters, Campbell makes Sinful come alive. I have read some of the books in this series visually when I didn’t want to wait for the audiobook to be released, and the audio versions have proven to be much more delightful than the print versions.
I truly enjoyed listening to Swamp Spook and give it five stars!
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