Halloween Party Murder by Leighann Dobbs

 Juniper Holiday is know for throwing the best Halloween party around. As she and her goddaughter, Victoria, make the final preparations for the spook ally in the guest house, they check the casket they borrowed from the mortuary and discover it contains a real dead body.  Juniper resigns herself to calling the local inspector, Desmond Mallard, who is as handsome as a male model but as boring as dry toast. As he starts to investigate, Juniper, with the help of her ghost and werewolf friends, decides she wants to solve the mystery before Inspector Mallard does. Her motivations are twofold; bragging rights, and because she is one of Mallard's prime suspects. 

I picked this book while I was working on a long and tedious task and needed something new to listen to in a hurry.  I thought, how fun, a Halloween book. In the end, it was squarely in the B to B- range.  The dialog is awkward and there never is any explanation why, halfway through the book, we discover that Juniper speaks to ghosts and is friends with werewolves. It is labeled as the first in a series, but I wonder if there wasn't one before it that introduced these "little" details. The upside of the book is that it is really short.  It is self-published but somehow it is available in audio on Libby, so there is hope out there for you Amazon publishing writers.  It wasn't terrible and didn't have anything objectionable in it, so if you want a very fast, very shallow, Halloween themed book, go for it. (2022, 170 p)