Another Darcy Sweet cozy mystery... this time I didn’t like it much, because the more I read of her the less I like Darcy.. I’m sorry but she looks to me like a pouting child most of the time, and her detective skills are zero, and the book’s investigation is like a farce, and Smudge is nothing more than a background figure totally unimportant this time...
I explain the book:
First of all, it starts with Darcy and Jon being all ‘perfect’, with her waking him up in the middle of the night to go look outside only because it’s starting to snow, and when he asks her how could she know she says it has nothing to do with her “abilities”, but even if he’s written like the perfect boyfriend, totally unrealistic if you ask me, she’s all ‘how can he still be uncomfortable with it after all he saw me doing, after I helped solved all those cases?’ and asks him “do you wish that I didn’t have them?” and makes a very big deal when he honestly replies yes. She goes on for pages on this, saying that their relationship is in trouble because he doesn’t accept her for who she is (!) and even that HE started the argument... I mean, if this is not a pouting child then it’s just a stupid one. What did she expect? Something like ‘I’ve always wanted to find a girlfriend that could see ghosts and be involved in murders and put herself in danger at every turn’? Come on! She made such a fuss out of it it was unbearable.
Because of that when a ghost visits her demanding that she solves his murder so he can finally find peace, she doesn’t immediately tell him; instead she bothers her sister.
She acts like she’s always doing it all, solving the mysteries, but she’s always demanding Jon or her sister Grace to work at it for her. They spend a lot of time helping her, she’s rather selfish if you ask me. She always thinks that what she has to do is more important than everything else..
When they finally talk and make peace - because of course the perfect boyfriend tells her that he’s only worried about her but accepts her completely for who she is - they investigate the death of a man that was killed in his own home some twenty years before. She saw the ghost’s face and she finds his name in her aunt Millie’s journal (Roger August), but the police reports don’t say much, so she does a few ‘communications’ - which she seems to do a lot although every time she tells us how difficult and dangerous they are and that she only does that when she has no other choice, which doesn’t seem the case to me at all since she goes about it like this: there’s a ghost with a case, she asks Jon, he has no clues, so she does a communication. Right away, more or less. In this book she does that more than once. At first she’s unsuccessful, then she sees the face of grumpy old Mr Baskin and immediately tells Jon that Baskin killed Roger! Why? What kind of investigation is that?? Fortunately the man has an alibi for the night of the town’s Christmas pageant when Jon and Darcy were almost killed when the stage fell down on them, so they don’t arrest him :-/
Her next communication teaches her that Roger had an affair with Rose, a woman police officer, and when Jon tells her that she was engaged to somebody else, the solution is obvious: the man found it all out and killed Roger. They find the name of the fiancée using the internet (..) and go to arrest him. He tries to run but as soon as he is caught he confesses everything spontaneously... which is the only way they could solve it because they had nothing, not a single proof :-/
To make the story longer, Roger’s daughter tells Darcy that the Santa suit Roger wore at the pageant the night before he died is haunted and that’s what killed him, so to be on the safe side Darcy puts a circle of candles around it for protection.. but still has no objections about Jon wearing it when he has to play Santa for the town's children...
The book ends on Christmas day, when she has Grace and her husband Aaron over at her place, and they all exchange gifts, and Jon gives her a rare book. Darcy gives him... a key to her place, then asks him to move in with her, which is the right step forward of course, and she put that off long enough already, but done like this it appears to be quite arrogant. To me it looked like ‘as a special gift I agree to let you come and stay with me’, knowing very well that he would accept when she put it like a question :-/
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