Rating: 4.5🌈
We first met all these people (alive and ghostly ) at the very haunted Ashton-Drake Manor House in the Dead Serious Case #4 Professor Prometheus Plume (Crawshanks Guide to the Recently Departed).
That was a fabulous supernatural murder mystery romp that was absolutely entertaining, romantic, and gave us an entirely new cast of characters to love.
The Haunted Hotel picks up in the aftermath of those events, the unwanted publicity and the trouble it’s brought to the Manor. And the unexpected surprises too.
One is a leftover guest, the horror book author Mr Pennington, whose writer’s block has vanished since the last events and his creative sparks are flowing! He’s decided to stay and write. The most important new element is the new arrival at the Manor.
Morgan Ashton-Drake has returned home after his mother took him to America when he was a young boy. Now he’s come home, only he can’t remember the ancient manor that holds both his history and memories and perhaps his future.
While Morgan is dealing with renewed relations with his grandfather, and his past, Ellis Sparks, and the rest of the found family of staff and ghosts of Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel have their own challenges to face.
Vawn Cassidy weaves in intimate relationships of family dynamics, romance, friendship, and ghostly goings on to come up with a warm-hearted, layered story of families, history, and love in believable terms. Even when there’s ghosts involved.
By the end, a new resolve has set in, an additional chapter begins, and someone else has come home. I love this book so much.
The Dead Serious Case #4 Professor Prometheus Plume (Crawshanks Guide to the Recently Departed) gives a wonderful foundation for this book as well as being a terrific story in a fantastic series. Don’t miss out on any of those stories.
I highly recommend reading them and this, the gorgeously crafted The Haunted Hotel (Crawshanks Guide to Mischievous Spectres & Spirits Book 1) by Vawn Cassidy . Now I can’t wait to see where the next novel takes everyone.
Crawshanks Guide to Mischievous Spectres & Spirits:
- The Haunted Hotel #1
Buy link
The Haunted Hotel (Crawshanks Guide to Mischievous Spectres & Spirits Book 1)
Blurb
Have a frightfully good stay…
Morgan Ashton-Drake hasn’t given his ancestral home in Yorkshire a second thought in decades. He has a great life in the States, running his stepfathers hotel empire with his brother. So what if he’s all work and no play. He’s not missing out on anything important.
But when a suspicious death and rather public scandal at his childhood home forces Morgan to return to England for the first time in years, he’s not keen to confront his past. What he didn’t count on was the seriously cute little blonde disaster who seems to be single-handedly running his eccentric grandfather’s hotel.
Ellis Sparks has worked at the Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel since he was sixteen and he loves it from the bottom of his soul. Always the eternal optimist, he’s never met a frown he can’t turn upside down; that is, until he meets Morgan Ashton-Drake, the grumpy grandson of his employer.
With the hotel in danger of closing, and convinced Morgan is the only one who can help to save it, the resident ghosts decide to try their ghostly hand at a little matchmaking as an incentive to get him to stay. After all, how hard can it be to get a grumpy workaholic to fall in love with a twinky ray of sunshine?
From the creator of Dead Serious comes this hilarious grumpy/sunshine spin off which will leave you wanting to book your own room at The Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel.
- Publisher: Underside Press (August 24, 2024)
- Publication date: August 24, 2024
- Language: English
- Print length: 277 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 