Book Review: A New Lease On Death by Olivia Blacke

When Ruby Young impulsively decides to flee Baltimore for Boston, finding a cheap furnished apartment in practically no time at all feels like an answered prayer. While she does her due diligence – learning that the previous owner died unexpectedly from an overdose, hence the availability and affordability – the last thing she expects is for there to be an actual ghost living in the apartment with her. But because Ruby is a resilient twenty-year-old, she takes a practical approach to having an invisible roommate, despite feeling bad about not being able to keep the former tenant’s many houseplants alive:

If there really was a ghost in this apartment, she probably hated me.

 

I hadn’t told anyone that my apartment was haunted. People already thought I was a flake. Whatever. Personally, I preferred “eccentric” but apparently, I wasn’t old enough or rich enough to be called eccentric. For now, I was just weird. It’s okay for weird people to believe in ghosts, but if they tell people there’s a ghost living with them, then they’re not weird. They’re not eccentric. They’re crazy. And not the socks-on-hands, aren’t-they-fun-at-parties kind of crazy, but the seriously-we’re-worried-about-you-Ruby crazy.

Thing is, Ruby genuinely isn’t imagining things. Forty-something Cordelia Graves woke up one day to realize that she was dead, and has been trying to figure out what to do about it ever since. When she finds the murdered body of her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake MacIntyre, she’s hopeful that she can help him figure out this afterlife together. She doesn’t quite succeed.

Guilt-stricken, she decides to focus her energies on helping out the only other person who seems to care that she still exists, even if it’s only in ghost form. Communicating isn’t easy, though. There’s no handbook for the recently deceased, so Cordelia has to make it up as she goes along. Things get more urgent when Cordelia starts to worry that Ruby is getting perhaps a little too interested in Jake’s murder:

How could I warn Ruby that she might be in danger, too? Since she was the only person in the whole world that even realized I still existed, she was by default the closest thing I had to a friend. And as her friend, I had to protect her. I’d failed Jake miserably, but I wasn’t going to fail Ruby. I needed to scare her away before anything bad happened to her, but how? She actually thought that having her very own ghost was cool, which meant I had to put a lid on my friendly Casper routine and get down to business.

 

[I] thought a few books flying off some shelves would send the message to back off, but instead, she thought it was funny. Seriously, what was wrong with this girl?

As the two women learn how to reach each other, they become not just friends but allies. Someone definitely killed Jake. Could that someone have been responsible for Cordelia’s death, too? She doesn’t remember what happened to her on the day that she died, or why anyone would want to harm her. But she does know that she would never have committed suicide.

Ruby, being a true crime aficionado, is more than game to investigate both deaths. As Cordelia guides her through Boston, the unlikely pair – so different in temperament and outlook yet united in their pursuit of justice – will do their best to ensure that justice is served while looking out for each other in the process.

A New Lease On Death was such a fun twist on the paranormal detective story! I loved Cordelia and Ruby’s friendship, and appreciated how Olivia Blacke let it develop naturally despite their sharply contrasting personalities. Each main character had her own distinct voice, upping the believability factor and making the reading experience that much more entertaining.

I also enjoyed how the main mystery was neatly wrapped up in this novel, even as the overarching plot involving what really happened to Cordelia left a terrific cliffhanger off of which to launch the next book in the series. Ms. Blacke’s storytelling skills have definitely grown more sophisticated with each book she writes. This is definitely my favorite of her novels so far, and I can’t wait to read what happens next!