Rating: 5🌈
Vawn Cassidy’s Crawshanks Guide to the Recently Departed is one of my favorite series. Dark humor, beautifully realized characters, and extremely well executed plots that convey the heartbreak and the joy of love and romance, the horror and hope of experiencing life and losing it, as well as the light and darkness that exists beyond. It’s all there in every story.
Each book revolves around a case of a dead person. Sometimes it’s horrifying, sometimes hilariously funny or tragic and traumatic. Sometimes it’s both sad and frightening. And all these things.
In Dead Serious Case #3 Mr Bruce Reyes #3, the small group, Inspector Danny Hayes, forensic pathologist Tristan Everett, ghost Dusty Le Frey, and her boyfriend, ghost Bruce Abernathy, among others, helped save the world. A scary, horrific tale, even if being immensely satisfying.
Now, Cassidy has written a fabulous story, one that’s naturally got a crime, a murder, a manor house full of the most wildly entertaining and exasperating people and ghosts. A natural bookend to the one prior.
The story opens up, realistically and wryly in the morgue, with an extremely exhausted Tristan trying to complete an examination, with ghostly onlookers inference. The outcome of this wonderful scenario will see two very tired men on a much needed holiday. One of which keeps trying to find the perfect place to propose.
What ensues is absolute narrative perfection. Amidst high comedy, murder most theatrical, and ghostly antics at The Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel, Cassidy’s also includes the raw issues these men face and the daily pain of their experiences. There’s an emotional reunion between Danny and his long estranged family, as well the wrenching emotional scenes of Tris trying to come to terms with the reality of his father’s approaching death from dementia.
The hijinks , murder included, to be found at the Manor, is a romp over the reality that Danny and Tris have left behind. When I say that Cassidy has created new characters and moments so quietly hilarious that I’d say they were “spew worthy” is to be understated.
Ah, Dilys! This the ancient, tiny bartender will forever be held responsible for the wine stains on the carpet as I giggled away at her approach!
I fell so deeply in love with everyone at The Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel, alive and ghostly, that I want the author to revisit this location and entertaining little group of inhabitants, whether it’s by a individual book or story in this series in the future. They are simply so perfect to consign to one book.
Throughout the events that occur and the characters that make up the zaniness’s of this investigation, this is one fabulous piece of murder that ranks among my favorite books of the year.
Of course, it’s a gift from the author, because the ending proves that this has always been a part of the larger universe and the scary enlarging arc the author’s been creating.
So amazing. Breathtaking really. For now we are halfway prepared for the darkness to come.
The is a series that’s an absolute must read, but do it in the order that the books are written. Highly recommended, at the top of my rec list.
Fabulous cover as usual.
Crawshanks Guide to the Recently Departed:
✓ Dead Serious Case #1 Miz Dusty Le Frey #1
✓ Dead Serious Case #2 Mrs Delores Abernathy #2
✓ Dead Serious Case #3 Mr Bruce Reyes #3
✓ Dead Serious Case #4 Professor Prometheus Plume #4
◦ Dead Serious Case #5 Madame Vivienne: Schedule 2024
Buy Link:
Blurb:
Inspector Danny Hayes has something very important to ask his boyfriend Tristan Everett. Over the past six months they’ve survived reapers, chaos monsters, and biblical storms, not to mention averting an apocalypse. So, what’s left to do but pop the big question?
Tristan is ready for a break from world-saving, spectral crises, and most definitely from ghosts. He wants some one-on-one time with his boyfriend, preferably horizontally. So when their Boxing Day celebrations result in a drunken booking of a romantic New Year’s getaway at a quiet little hotel near the wilds of the north Yorkshire moors, Tristan can’t wait.
But as usual nothing ever goes according to plan. Snowed in during an unexpected murder mystery weekend at what turns out to be one of the most haunted hotels in Northern England is not what they had in mind, but when one of the actors turns up really dead not just fake dead, they once again find themselves caught up in another investigation.
With only one night to figure out who the killer is while wrangling a multitude of overly helpful ghosts, Tristan begins to wonder if romance really is dead…
• Publisher: (December 31, 2023)
• Publication date: December 31, 2023
• Print length: 285 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 