The Accidental Medium

A struggling British actress starts seeing ghosts who enlist her crime-solving help in a clever, comic paranormal mystery series.

In The Accidental Medium, British author Tracy Whitwell launches the first in a hilariously clever, paranormal cozy mystery series.

Readers will be rapt by the free-wheeling narrative voice of Tania--aka Tanz--a struggling, 38-year-old, British actress waiting for her next big breakthrough role. Neurotic and self-deprecating, Tanz is going through a rough patch. She’s grieving the loss of an unrequited love--a 32-year-old male friend who died in a freak car accident--whose ghost keeps appearing in her dreams. Tanz has also become a “borderline alcoholic,” indulging in “buckets of Merlot,” and she’s “addicted to old-school horror films and magazines about murders.” Such behaviors were only exacerbated when “the complete bastard” she used to love moved out, leaving her to pay the rent on her own.

 

When Tanz is forced to take an interim job booking tarot card readings at a local, new age shop, the “Mystery Pot,” she fears she’s been plunged into a world of “nutters.” But when more ghosts suddenly start appearing, enlightening Tanz to make predictions about other peoples’ futures, she reluctantly starts utilizing her suddenly acquired medium-clairvoyant skills. Things take a dramatic turn when she’s visited by a murder victim who enlists her help in identifying her killer and bringing the perpetrator to justice.

 

The sharp-tongued, street-smart ingenuity of Whitwell’s (Love Button) lovable heroine--along with tight plotting and a cast of off-beat characters--makes for a wildly fun, bright as lightning start to a crafty new series.

 

The Accidental Medium (The Accidental Medium, Book One) by Tracy Whitwell

MacMillan/Pan Publishing, $18,99 paperback, 9781529087529, 304 pages

Publishing Date: April 9, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (May 10, 2024), link HERE 

The Year of What If

An enlightened, feel-good novel about a middle-aged woman who goes on a quest to revisit her past in order map out her future. 

Just when it appears as though 42-year-old Carla Carter--a divorced dating expert and entrepreneur--is about to start a glorious new chapter in her life, a visit to a psychic upends her hoped for ‘happy ending’ in Phaedra Patrick’s enlightened, feel-good new novel, The Year of What If. 

Carla is emerging from a sordid past. A supposed curse was said to be placed upon her family many years before that has familial folks believing that all females in the bloodline will never find true and lasting love. Carla has always attributed the hex to her first, regrettable (and forgettable) first marriage. 

After she establishes Logical Love, a dating app, and the algorithm pairs her up with Tom, a game inventor who later becomes her fiancé, it would appear as though Carla is on the road to a fresh, new start…and she’ll finally be the one to break the dreaded spell. 

Her superstitious family, however, intervenes and forces Carla to visit a psychic who urges that Tom isn’t the man she should marry. Rather, she believes a man Carla met twenty years before, during Carla’s ‘gap-year’ after college graduation, is really the love of her life. 

Upon the urging of the psychic and her family, Carla cannot rest. She sets off on a quest--not telling Tom about the nature of her travels--through Europe in search of looking up men who might’ve crossed her path during that oh-so-innocent time in her life. 

With signature insight and tender humor, Patrick (The Little Italian Hotel, The Messy Lives of Book People) once again takes readers on an exciting, adventurous literary journey where one woman’s search for a former flame actually leads her down a path to self-discovery.

The Year of What If: A Novel by Phaedra Patrick

Park Row Books/HarperCollins, $17.99 paperback, 978-0778310891, 336 pages

Publishing Date: June 25, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE