4/5 stars
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, by Kate Racculia (2019)
"The Westing Game meets the love child of the movies Ghost and Clue."
Another book by author Kate Racculia - earlier this year I read her first novel, Bellweather Rhapsody, and loved it. I wasn't quite as enamored with this one, but I still really enjoyed it.
Tuesday Mooney is a kind of goth, 30-something woman who researches rich people for a living. She works at a Boston area hospital in Development, digging into online documents to help identify individuals who could become donors. She mostly keeps to herself, besides her best friend Dex, who longs to be in music or theatre but holds down a steady job in finance to satisfy his father's idea of a lucrative career, and her neighbor Dorry, a teenager much like Tuesday was herself at a young age. Tuesday and Dorry have something else in common as well - they've both lost someone important to them. Dorry lost her mother to a car accident, and Tuesday, at 16 years old, lost her best friend Abby, who disappeared and was never found (& presumed dead). Both are haunted by their lost loves, and both have some level of belief that their mother/best friend is either still with them and talks to them, or would talk to them if only they could figure out a way to make contact.
All this sets the stage for a tremendous adventure, when local, eccentric billionaire Vincent Pryce dies, leaving behind an intricate treasure hunt that he invites all Bostonians to participate in. Tuesday teams up with another young millionaire from a rival family, with a whole host of secrets of his own. Clues take them to an abandoned underground theatre, an abandoned mansion, and a masquerade-ball-slash-funeral in Boston Common. The winner will find money and a glimpse into Pryce's famed, eclectic collection of oddities. Tuesday, Dex, and Dorry all find love interests along the way - but thankfully this does not overtake the central story itself. My favorite moment was actually the appearance of Rabbit Hatmaker, one of the main characters from Bellweather Rhapsody (a child in the first book, he is now an adult and the love interest of Dex).
The only part about this book that was a little difficult for me to buy into was the ghosts... or, the belief in ghosts, I guess. It's all left ambiguous enough that you don't have to believe they exist, but concrete enough that it seems like they do. Still, it was a small enough part of the book that it didn't bother me much. I do, however, think the title of the book needs some workshopping.
UP NEXT: Just finished reading In the House in the Dark of the Woods, by Laird Hunt
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