2 years prior, Alyssa and her beloved husband, Garrett, were involved in a terrible car accident that left her with a scar on her face and him six feet under. She's especially struggling since her 16-year-old daughter Ava is away at art boarding school, so her besties Lanie and Nina aim to pull her out of this funk. Lanie is her slightly bohemian friend who is a barista and a yoga instructor, while Nina is a bit more uptight, what with being the wife of Mayor Richard Dunbar. So naturally, it's Lanie who comes up with the idea of a birthday reading from Madame Corinne, although Alyssa is not so sure. However, after copious amounts of alcohol, she insists they go. Let's just say it doesn't go as planned.
Something strange definitely happened during that séance, but Alyssa didn't get to talk to her husband. Instead, Madame Corinne shooed them out quickly, right after Alyssa felt that electrical charge when Corinne grabbed her hand. No harm, no foul, though right? Until she wakes up in the middle of the night with a strange man in her bedroom who claims she called him! What the actual?
This guy says his name is Billy Garet and he claims to be dead, but someone must be playing a joke on her. She runs out the house and straight to her hot next door neighbor, Nick West, who happens to be a police detective. Maybe he can help? Nick takes things very seriously, but finds no strange man, or anyone else, in the house. But the next day, Billy is back, and he needs Alyssa's help to move on to the great beyond. Except that he doesn't know what he needs, but he did die in a car accident and maybe it wasn't an accident? Then there's another ghost who shows up named Jackson Moore, who is even more surly than Billy, and naturally, the two knew one another. He also died in an accident, but he was on a motorcycle. Jackson claims someone threw a large branch in his way, causing him to crash and he has descriptions. Alyssa is collecting all of this info, but how does she get Detective Nick to re-open these cases ruled suicide (in Billy's case) and accident (in Jackson's)? She's got the leads, but he'll think she's bats if she reveals her sources are the dead guys themselves. But then a local waitress comes up missing and she just so happened to work at Clementine's Bar, where both Billy and Jackson were, right before their respective wrecks. And this waitress, Jenna Cruz, is reaching out to Alyssa from beyond the grave too. Now there's a time-sensitive clue she must share with Nick, if only to give Jenna's family some peace.
Alyssa, Lanie, Nina and newest friend, Corinne, get to work trying to solve these potential crimes, but Nick keeps asking Alyssa to stay out of it all. After all, the Mayor himself quietly closed Billy's case and Nick is risking his job by digging into this stuff. Plus, he's kind of taken a shine to Alyssa and feels very protective of her. As they grow closer, will he be able to believe her about the ghosts whispering in her ear? Even if he doesn't, he can't argue with Alyssa's intel when it leads straight to a dead body.
As Nick zeroes in on what really happened to Billy and Jackson, he riles up those truly responsible for the crimes, leading to a shocking shoot-out and a last ditch effort séance for the truth. When everything comes to a head, it will forever change the lives of these four friends, who eventually dub themselves the "Gin and Tarot Club" based upon what they drink and do at their get-togethers. There's a nice set-up for future shenanigans with ghosts and the "woo-woo" involved with them, so I hope this is the start of a series.
An Enchanting Case of Spirits is a book I would typically classify as a cozy mystery, but this book definitely has more teeth than your average book in that genre. Still, it has all the right ingredients including romance, mystery, murder, and even a collection of opinionated ghosts. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope to see more from Melissa Holtz in the future, especially in this universe.
