Night of the Loving Dead: A Pepper Martin Mystery

by: Casey Daniels

Published by: Berkley Prime Crime

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

Fifth in the Pepper Martin series, this installment takes Pepper away from her Cleveland cemetery where she works as a tour guide, all the way to Chicago, replacing her boss at a cemetery conference!

Her life is extremely complicated by the fact that she can see ghosts, resulting from a fall when she hit her head on a tombstone. These ghosts beg her to help them solve mysteries or prevent murders. This time it is the ghost of Madeline Tremayne, who she runs into during a tour of a Chicago cemetery. Dead three years, Madeline wants her to expose her old boss Dr. Hilton Gerard, psychiatrist and director of a free mental health clinic for the homeless. She claims that Dr. Gerard has been embezzling some of the money he had raised to keep the clinic going. She forces Pepper to do her bidding by hinting that Pepper’s old friend Dan Callahan has been involved, and that only she can save Dan from certain arrest if Gerard’s crime gets out. Pepper had gotten over her attraction to Dan, and had just begun a promising little entanglement with old flame Quinn Harrison, a cop back in Cleveland, when she had to leave for the conference.

Nothing is as it seems in this cozy mystery. Madeline has dark secrets, and Dan had a hidden agenda for helping Pepper–he wanted desperately to contact a dead loved one.

Gerard seems to take the mentally ill homeless into his “test” program, and they are never seen again. Pepper decides she must get into the clinic to discover the truth. Will this be her last investigation?

Armchair Interviews says: A cozy with a good story and a little romance.

Author’s Web site: http://www.CaseyDaniels.com