{"id":95,"date":"2011-12-29T15:17:49","date_gmt":"2011-12-29T21:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=95"},"modified":"2011-12-29T15:17:49","modified_gmt":"2011-12-29T21:17:49","slug":"casey-daniels-a-hard-days-fright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/casey-daniels-a-hard-days-fright\/","title":{"rendered":"Casey Daniels: A Hard Day’s Fright"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Daniels has been a very busy lady since I first met her, when her first Pepper Martin book, Don of the Dead<\/em>, was published.\u00a0 Since then she\u2019s written six more \u201cPepper\u201d books, and started a cooking related series under the name of Miranda Bliss.\u00a0 This latest \u201cPepper\u201d book is not only fun, it\u2019s a terrific story, and Pepper has developed as a character since I first encountered her.\u00a0 If you are unfamiliar with the series, Pepper works as a tour guide in an historic Cleveland cemetery.\u00a0 When she starts her job in the first book, she\u2019s distressed to discover that the pesky ghost of a dead mob boss is following her around, asking her to find out what\u2019s happened to him.\u00a0 Since Pepper is the only one who can hear him, he doesn\u2019t let up, and another career is born: investigating what\u2019s happened to the already dead.<\/p>\n

During the in-between books Pepper\u2019s gotten a bit of a reputation on the \u201cother side\u201d and there\u2019s a long line of different ghosts looking for help.\u00a0 Pepper also acquired – and lost – a policeman boyfriend, Quinn, and she\u2019s become invaluable to her boss at the cemetery, Ella, despite a somewhat dubious work ethic and slight preoccupation with clothes.<\/p>\n

In this outing, Pepper is riding the Cleveland mass transit to work, called in Cleveland the \u201cRapid\u201d, when a chilly presence from beyond reaches out and asks her to find not only who killed her, but where her body was buried.\u00a0 The dead girl turns out to be a teenager, Lucy, who died (happy) in 1966, the night she saw The Beatles in concert and made it onstage to kiss Paul McCartney.\u00a0 As it happens Ella, Pepper\u2019s boss, was the admiring younger girl who went with Lucy and her gang of cool friends to the Beatles concert.\u00a0 As far as Ella knows, Lucy has only \u201cdisappeared.\u201d\u00a0 The fact that she\u2019s actually dead is one Pepper has a very hard time keeping to herself.<\/p>\n

When Pepper first encounters Ella, though, she\u2019s hysterical as her 15 year old daughter, Ariel, had vanished for an entire weekend.\u00a0 While the girl has come home, things are not so cool at home.\u00a0 Pepper dislikes Ariel heartily and is very unhappy when she discovers that Ella has decided that Ariel will come to the cemetery after school, where she will be supervised at all times.\u00a0 Sometimes, of course, that supervisor turns out to be Pepper.\u00a0 Ariel decides that Pepper\u2019s \u201chobby\u201d of investigating is an interesting one and she starts to follow Pepper around, forsaking her angsty girl goth look for Pepper\u2019s slightly more mainstream one.\u00a0 Whether you believe a teenager can turn around that fast is up to you; I find it less believable than a talking ghost, but Daniels makes you believe it for the purposes of the story.<\/p>\n

As Pepper and her assistant Ariel begin to unravel the strands of Lucy\u2019s last night by looking into the lives of all the friends that were at the concert with her, they uncover all kinds of unpleasant stuff like alcoholism and suicide.\u00a0 Daniels has a light hand but the stories of the teenagers, now adults, will probably stick with you, as she\u2019s a gifted storyteller who doesn\u2019t pull any punches.\u00a0 I read the book almost straight through and looked forward to picking it up again when I wasn\u2019t reading it.<\/p>\n

While I may have figured out \u201cwhodunnit\u201d I didn\u2019t mind as there were enough twists and revelations along the way to hold my interest.\u00a0 I enjoyed the changing relationship between Ariel and her mother, and Daniel\u2019s portrait of a pretentious academic poet is so delicious you really should read the book to get the full flavor.\u00a0 It\u2019s well worth it.\u00a0 I\u2019m now looking forward to the next book, and as Daniels, like any good storyteller, throws Pepper a curveball in her last sentence, I\u2019m already curious to see what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniels has been a very busy lady since I first met her, when her first Pepper Martin book, Don of the Dead, was published.\u00a0 Since then she\u2019s written six more \u201cPepper\u201d books, and started a cooking related series under the name of Miranda Bliss.\u00a0 This latest \u201cPepper\u201d book is not only fun, it\u2019s a terrific … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}