A New Lease on Death
(The Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries Book 1)
by Olivia Blacke

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Death is only the beginning in Olivia Blacke’s A New Lease on Death, a darkly funny supernatural mystery that introduces an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Ruby Young’s new Boston apartment comes with all the usual perks. Windows facing the brick wall of the next-door building. Heat that barely works. A malfunctioning buzzer. Noisy neighbors. A dead body on the sidewalk outside. And of course, a ghost.

Since Cordelia Graves died in her apartment a few months ago, she’s kept up her residency, despite being bored out of her (non-tangible) skull and frustrated by her new roommate. When her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake Macintyre, is shot and killed in an apparent mugging gone wrong outside their building, Cordelia is convinced there’s more to it and is determined to bring his killer to justice.

Unfortunately, Cordelia, being dead herself, can’t solve the mystery alone. She has to enlist the help of the obnoxiously perky, living tenant of her apartment. Ruby is twenty, annoying, and has never met a houseplant she couldn’t kill. But she also can do everything Cordelia can’t, from interviewing suspects to researching Jake on the library computers that go up in a puff of smoke if Cordelia gets too close. As the roommates form an unlikely friendship and get closer to the truth about Jake’s death, they also start to uncover other dangerous secrets.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Mind over matter went out the window when you’re not made of matter anymore.

He thought he was god’s gift to women. Women thought otherwise.

I looked down at my hands. They looked the same as they had when I was alive. Pale. Dry. My fingernails were short and my nail polish was chipped. If I’d known I would become a ghost, I would have painted my nails before I offed myself. Now I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity in dire need of a manicure and some hand lotion.

It was hard to tell his exact age, but I’d put him in that sweet spot between old enough to have a respectable job and his own apartment and young enough to pay full price at the movies.

I was very, very young when I first realized that life wasn’t fair. And then again, in my forties, I found out that death wasn’t very fair, either. If you died wearing uncomfortable underwear, you spent your entire afterlife wandering around with a wedgie.

My Review:

This was a clever and fresh take on the concept of an unexpected afterlife and learning the ins and outs of being dead and navigating among the living. I gleefully whizzed through this amusing and witty missive with a pleased smirk on my face. The writing was entertaining, easy to follow, wryly humorous, and kept me engaged and unwilling to put my Kindle down, until my traitorous eyes rebelliously closed on their own. I adored it so much I immediately queued up the next installment of the series.

About the Author

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Olivia Blacke (she/her) is the Anthony Award-winning author of the Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries, as well as the cozy Record Shop Mysteries and the Brooklyn Murder Mysteries. She had her first ghost encounter when she was five, but wasn’t involved with an active crime scene until much later, when she accidentally stepped into a chalk outline on a Manhattan sidewalk. Armed with a Criminology degree, she channels her love of the supernatural and passion for writing into darkly humorous supernatural mysteries. She wants to be a unicorn when she grows up.