Spirited by Mary Behre

ORDER A COPY: Spirited (A Tidewater Novel)

Publisher: Berkley
Publishing Date: March 4, 2014
Paperback: 320 pages

Rating: 2 stars

All Jules Scott wants is to live a normal, quiet life—preferably one that doesn’t include ghosts. Jules’s talent for communicating with the dead has brought her nothing but trouble. Despite her best efforts, needy spirits always find her and draw her into their otherworldly drama. When one implicates her in a series of deadly crimes, she may need to entrust her secrets to the person least likely to believe her.…

Detective Seth English can’t get distracted from the big case he’s working on, not even by his alluring new neighbor. He doesn’t believe that Jules had anything to do with the string of robberies-turned-murders that he’s investigating, but when she keeps showing up in all the wrong places, his gut tells him she knows more than she’s letting on. To solve his case, he’ll need to expose what the sexy redhead is hiding—no matter how impossible the truth may be….

Jules sees dead people. All her life she has been seeing ghosts and try as she might, she hasn’t been able to block them or even avoid them. Those ghosts caused the end of her marriage and her new philosophy is to ignore them and just maybe they’ll go away.

Except once again she is being haunted by a woman who was murdered and who is insisting that Jules help her. Of course, the hot guy in the next apartment is a cop and not just any cop, he’s the head investigator on the murder, but there would be no way that he’ll believe that Jules is getting information from a ghost. Just like her ex-husband, he’ll accuse her of being involved in the crime.

As Jules gets drawn into the middle of Seth’s case, the sparks fly between them. But the past has taught Jules that not everyone believes of the supernatural, and opening up to Seth might just turn him against her.

THOUGHTS:
I didn’t enjoy this story.  I just wasn’t drawn in by the characters or the storyline. Seth was distrusting since his ex-wife was on drugs and went bat-shit crazy and somehow that boiled down to his almost losing his job and definitely losing his standing in the department and being passed over by younger guys. This makes him come off as desperate to solve this investigation so his captain will let him can take the sergeants exam. Yet, I still didn’t feel that I understood how her being crazy destroyed his career except he didn’t see that his wife had a problem with prescription meds.  His paranoia goes so far that when Jules drops a packet of oregano in his apartment, he flushes it down the toilet and accuses her of planting marijuana in his apartment.

Jules, on the other hand, has been seeing ghosts all her life, but she didn’t seem to have a handle on either really getting real information from them or totally blocking them.  You would think by now she would have chosen one or the other and worked on that.   She really didn’t get too much information out of the ghost that helped solve the crime aside from getting headaches and vomiting from interacting with them. She seemed always frazzled and I could never feel any real connection between her and Seth.

Some story plots were thrown in to add depth and interest, but didn’t go anywhere.  Seth’s family owned the local Greek restaurant and he and Jules went there to eat and discuss the case. The only family member you meet briefly is Seth’s daughter so I don’t understand the need to discuss the family run business except to introduce that he has a close knit family, while Jules was an orphan tossed from one foster family to another. Or why it mattered that the couple who finally adopted her were only slightly older than her.

As far as the case, you could have done completely without the ghost aspect as Jules’s life intersected with the victim before her death or she could have removed with intersection with the victim and just used the ghost aspect.

So most of the story I felt it to be just meh. What did get me crazy was that the whole time Jules didn’t want to tell Seth about her gift and that she was getting information from the victim’s ghost because her ex-husband (also a police officer) arrested her on a crime because she got information on a kidnapping from a ghost (but not really useful information so again I am not understanding what’s so great about her gift). So the whole time she is worried that Seth wouldn’t believe her and that he would believe she knew things because she was involved. When she finally tells him, he accuses her of trying to destroy his career (like his ex-wife) and he calls her a crazy liar and tries to arrest her for the crime. Shocking!  Maybe you should have told him when someone who knows you can talk to ghosts could have backed you up!   Even after he tells her he loves her, he is still thinking “too bad she’s fucking crazy.” So why, why, why would she forgive this jackass so quickly since he betrayed her exactly like she feared he would.

I am sorry to say that I would not recommend this story due to both characters and storyline. 🙁

Received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.