Happy Release Day!
Congratulations Mallory
on the release today of
Ghost With the Most!
Ghost With the Most by Mallory Pierce
Ghost Mysteries, 342 pages
Published March 20, 2024
Gwen has a new lease on her afterlife, but Nolan's past threatens to ruin everything.
Several months after catching a murderer together, spirited ghost Gwen and moody horror writer Nolan have settled into their unusual living arrangement, and all seems to be going well until...
Karissa Jones, the woman who broke Nolan’s heart, shows up on his and Gwen’s doorstep, and the duo’s friendship is put to the test. Gwen questions the self-absorbed influencer’s motives for wanting to reconnect with Nolan, but he trusts his ex-girlfriend implicitly and won’t hear a word said against her.
When Karissa is discovered with the bloodied corpse of bad boy rocker Scorch, whom she recently dumped and wished dead on social media, she is suspect number one. Nolan wants to clear her name by tracking down the real culprit, but Gwen isn’t convinced of Karissa’s innocence.
Despite being at odds, Nolan and Gwen team up once again to pursue leads and sift through clues. Unfortunately, there’s a long list of people who wanted the mercurial musician dead. Will they be able to crack the case before Karissa is sentenced to life in an orange jumpsuit?
If you enjoy sassy sleuths and supernatural shenanigans, you won’t want to miss Ghost With the Most! It’s similar in tone and content to the works of Paranormal Cozy Mystery authors Angie Fox, Erin Huss, and Annabel Chase.
(I love to note the first lines of the books I'm reading. First lines can really grab a reader's attention and I love seeing where the author takes the reader after their first line.)
First lines—"'No.' A word I'd grown accustomed to hearing from Nolan Drake, the bespectacled and bewhiskered man who owned the Victorian house in the charming town of Woebrook, New York that I'd been inhabiting for almost 133 years."
Oh my gosh, I love this series so much! I love Gwen and Nolan and their quirky, entertaining relationship. Honestly I enjoy their repartee so much that I can't help but smile and chuckle through the whole story. The two of them crack me up!
Gwen and Nolan always find themselves in the middle of a murder and involve themselves to figure out who the murderer is. And that is when the fun begins. Nolan provides the straight-man, sometimes bumbling, element to this detective duo. Gwen is the smarter, more level headed character, but she sometimes has to rely on Nolan since she is of the spirit world. I love when she feeds ideas and clues to him in order to get him out of sticky situations.
As the series goes deeper, there will be other characters added, I'm sure, and I so enjoyed the character introduced in this book. I look forward to more interactions between him and Gwen. And let's not forget that Gwen is searching for answers about her own death. I can't wait to see how that plays out.
Book #1, That's the Spirit, was fabulous and so much fun to read. I loved getting to know these two and this was a story unlike any I'd read before—the real world and the spirit world working together to solve a crime. And then the author out does herself with book #2. It was even more fun!
I highly recommend this series! It was a very enjoyable story that I devoured and I look forward to more antics and crime-solving from Gwen and Nolan. Check it out!
I received a copy of Ghost With the Most from the author and this is my honest opinion.
Book #1
Read my thoughts here.
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Excerpt
“I don’t like this. She asked you to come here, so why is she leading you on a merry cha—”
A high-pitched scream sliced through the air, and Nolan started violently, making the chocolate he was drinking splash up out of the cup and down onto his sweater. He didn’t seem to notice or care as the cup slipped from his hands and he turned to me with a look of wide-eyed panic.
“That was Karissa! She needs help.”
Frantically, he fought his way out of the crowd of people, who were turning their heads,
their expressions befuddled as they tried to determine who or what had issued the blood-curdling sound.
“Excuse him,” I said to the individuals Nolan was carelessly trampling. Although they couldn’t hear me, it made me feel better to maintain some sense of decorum.
Once he was free of the throng, Nolan’s head whipped to the left, then to the right as he tried to figure out which way to go.
I observed that the people who were congregating by the refreshment booths and fire pits looked as confused by the noise as the ones closer to the tent, which told me that Karissa, and the reason for her shriek, were not in their midst.
“What about those tents over there?” I directed Nolan’s attention to the pair of nondescript, gray structures that could be seen just around the far corner of the exhibition tent and he took off at a run.
I’d caught sight of the twin tents earlier when we’d been in line at the What the Fudge booth. They were approximately half the size of the big, striped tent and their flaps weren’t tied back so their interiors weren’t open to public viewing, which led me to believe they were being used for storage.
Nolan banked hard to his right and almost lost his footing in the snow.
“Be careful!” I cautioned, but he was too focused on getting inside the tents and finding Karissa.
“Check that one!” Nolan waved me off to the first tent while he barreled toward its neighbor.
“I think I should stay with you,” I said and received no argument.
Pushing his way through the tent flaps that doubled as a door, Nolan called, “Karissa!”
He was stopped short by the sight that greeted him.
“Is that Scorch?” It was a reasonable assumption as I wasn’t aware of anyone else who had flames tattooed on his neck and face.
I hurried forward to get a closer look at the inked, leather-clad body lying in a supine position on the snow-covered ground while Nolan’s only concern was for the woman who was kneeling next to him, whimpering.
“Karissa.” He moved toward her slowly, holding out his hand.
Raising her tear-filled eyes to his, she said in a hushed tone, “I think he’s dead.”
“Which is generally what happens when you stab someone in the abdomen with” —I bent down to ascertain what the sharp object protruding from the man’s midsection was— “an ice pick.”
“She didn’t do it,” Nolan hissed at me.
“The blood on her hands and clothing say otherwise.” Karissa had wiped the former on the cropped, white sweater she was wearing beneath a silver, quilted jacket that had a fur-trimmed hood.
“I would never . . .” Karissa shook her head vehemently. “He was like this when I walked in, I swear. I tried to help. I thought if I could pull out that thing . . .” She flapped a blood-stained hand at the wood-handled, steel tool.
“You touched the murder weapon?” Nolan grimaced, knowing that she would have left her fingerprints all over it.
“Well, yeah.” She sniffled and swiped her hand under her nose, leaving a streak of blood behind.
“That’s what they’d do on Grey’s Anatomy, right? Remove the foreign object and apply pressure to the wound. It’s really stuck in there though. I couldn’t get it to budge, and there’s soooo much . . . blood.”
Her voice broke on the last word, and she started sobbing in earnest.
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About the author
Connect with Mallory
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Mallory Pierce is a third-generation graveyard enthusiast (tombstones tell such interesting stories!), reader of Nancy Drew, player of Clue, devout dissectologist (look it up!), and the owner of several fetching trench coats. So, it makes perfect sense that she spends her days writing stories about a plucky, crime-solving ghost.
Despite having visited haunted houses from San Jose to Savannah, Mallory has yet to have a close encounter with anyone from the Great Beyond and that’s probably for the best because she’s sort of a wimp. Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone.
Ghost With the Most is the second book in the GhostWriter Mystery Series, which is penned by Mallory Pierce (a pseudonym of award-winning Romantic Comedy author Tracie Banister).
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Thanks for celebrating Release Day of Ghost With the Most with this wonderful post, Susan!
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