Domestic Partners in Crime #3
If you’re from southeast Michigan, these books really should be a must read. This zippy cozy series is set in Pleasant Ridge and features Michigan details like Shinola watches and Sanders bumpy cake, but even if you aren’t from the mitten, these are still fun reads. Main characters and life partners PJ and JP are, among other things, hosts of an “HDTV” home renovation series, where they take old houses and restore them to their former glory. This charming gay couple reminds me strongly of my favorite couple on HGTV’s Detroit based Bargain Block, and like it or not, their faces have attached themselves to my reading of the books.
This instalment is especially yummy, as the men take on an old, possibly haunted, house right around Halloween. The backstory: the 25-year-old owner, in long ago 1997, died after plunging off the balcony at the top of the house during her 25th birthday party – dressed as Princess Diana, no less. The story goes back and forth in time as the guys try to discern what happened all those years ago, talking to now older folks in town who attended the party. What’s more, the family associated with the house all seem to die untimely deaths, and so it’s felt there’s some kind of family curse.
Nevertheless, the daughter of the dead woman, Fiona, now an Indie music star, wants to restore the house and live in it (though her bratty boyfriend doesn’t seem so keen). Because of Fiona’s celebrity and the whole haunted house-ghost angle, HDTV is eager to have the guys get to work both on a new season of their show and on restoring the house. And in fact as they get to work the house does seem to be haunted, with a series of potentially serious accidents accompanying ghostly sightings.
JP is relentless and PJ is brave despite his anxieties and fears (they balance each other nicely) and they are neither letting go of their show or the idea that someone more temporal is behind the ghostliness. The layers they manage to peel away through their gentle questioning of survivors of that long ago deadly night form a good picture of Fiona’s family as well as of the dead woman’s life and her various ties of both friendship and kinship, good and bad, in her community.
The author paints a nice picture of their home life with their rescue dogs and their lovingly restored craftsman style house. The rule of the cozy mystery is that order be restored so that life can return to normal, and the two characters in this book manage to pull that off. They don’t even seem out of bounds in their sleuthing efforts which could be taken as just general nosiness, even though they are of course putting together a complete picture of events. They are both likeable and different enough from each other to form an engaging couple, one you’re happy to reunite with in each book. As a reader, by book three, I promise you’ll have real affection for both JP and PJ and their rescue dogs. — Robin Agnew