There are ironies inherently riddled through the cosy mystery genre and the supernatural cosy mystery subgenre only adds another one.

Mysteries are fundamentally about death, because someone is dead and presumably through nefarious means, so the primary task at hand is to figure out who and why, but the cosy aspect shies  away from death, because it's icky and impolite and is therefore relegated off screen. It lends itself to small communities, where writers can build character in both people and places and make us want to live there with them, but also to series so those small communities boast statistically anomalous murder rates that make us not want to live there after all.

The one that keeps leaping out at me reading Beth Dolgner's 'Eternal Rest Bed and Breakfast' series is that it's all about death because it's a mystery; it shies away from that death because it's a cosy mystery; but then it embraces it in a new way because it's a supernatural cosy mystery. For example, Kelly Stern was the murder victim in the first book, 'Sweet Dreams', having been killed next door at the Oak Hill Memorial Garden, and that would typically mean that her part is over and done. However, she liked what Emily Buchanan and Sage Clark did to help her there so decided to hang around the place and she's now a series regular, even though she's dead. To be fair, these ghosts are all dead off-screen, but they're still dead nonetheless.

It would appear that many of the regulars in this series are going to be dead but communicate with the leads through ghostly means. Mrs. T. answers questions through knocks. Kelly makes her thoughts known through writing. GG works by taking control of the medium for a moment. When this book's murder victim is murdered, he manifests through angry footsteps upstairs. Given that he's a complete asshole who dares to flaunt his entitlement and impose his will on everybody and their dog, I'm mostly hoping that he won't become a regular. One small part of me, however, wonders if being dead might calm him down a little. Death is the great equaliser, after all.

He's Jaxon Knight-MacGinn and he's one owner of Mountain View, the abandoned hotel on the edge of town that he's planning to renovate and turn into a resort. He checks into Eternal Rest with his business partner and fellow owner, David Neil, who actually has family history in Oak Hill; their contractor, Warren Simmons; and their lawyer, Alexis Burski. It's quite a wake-up call for Emily, her staff and her ghosts, because everybody thus far has been as lovely as we expect characters to be in cosy mystery novels. Jaxon—I have no interest in typing Knight-MacGinn a ridiculous number of times in this review—simply revels in not being one of those.

I'm sorry, but I wanted to punch him in the face after one scene and I'm a non-confrontational Englishman who's used to putting up with people and starting sentences with "I'm sorry, but". Kelly's response to his first requirements—he gives Emily, his host at a B&B, an actual to-do list—is a written "UGH". No wonder the townsfolk are quickly united in opposition to the plans he has for Mountain View. I'm sure there are fair concerns about how his insular approach might negatively affect the town without positively affecting its businesses, but I'm sure that they'd be a little less collectively up in arms if he wasn't such a huge asshole. Even at Eternal Rest, he soon escalates to threats. He's a textbook visitor from hell.

Of course, that means that when he's murdered, there are plenty of suspects, including many of the townsfolk we're starting to meet as Dolgner expands our awareness of Oak Hill. Emily is everywhere in the story, perhaps more than we expect. Certainly Roger Newton, a local police officer asks her, "Miss Emily, are you part of another murder investigation?" I had to laugh at that because we're only on book two. He'll be apoplectic by book seven!

It's Emily who realises that something's up after Jaxon fails to respond to his morning wake-up call that he's demanded. It's Emily as the owner of Eternal Rest who's tasked with handing over video footage to show that he vanished the previous night, walking out in the wee hours. And it's Emily who finds his body at Mountain View, which is far less convenient than it might seem. Jaxon has required her to pick up lunch from the Depot and deliver it to his group at Mountain View every day and there are ghosts there who want her to know things.

There are three crucial details to focus on there and Dolgner floats a fourth in between them that I expect will build over the rest of the series, at least the next book.

The first is that Dolgner is careful about expanding Oak Hill. In 'Sweet Dreams', we spent most of our time at Eternal Rest or next door at the Memorial Garden. We learned that Sage Clark, Emily's friend and the medium who conducts the Spirited Saturday Night séances at the B&B, has her own shop in town called Seeing Beyond. However, that was about it. Here, we start out at Sutter's Bar and visit Ellis Hardware, the family business of Trip, Emily's new assistant, and characterfully named businesses like the Depot, Grainy Day Bakery and Everything Old is New Again, which is an antique store.

The main is Jaxon's murder, naturally, which surely involves Mountain View and the fact that a decent number of the owners of the businesses above could easily be considered suspects. We find clues there, making this book a mystery that we can try to figure out ahead of characters much more than the first entry in the series. Some are impossible to miss, like one that I won't spoil because it turns up later than I thought in the book, but others are much subtler and task us with paying attention to details, which every mystery reader should always do.

The third is the fact that Emily is gaining in power. As the series began, she had an openness to ghosts and certainly experienced them in Eternal Rest, but she needed Sage to act as medium. In other words, she always had the potential to communicate with spirits but in a limited form. Sage, of course, has explored her talent and honed her skills and focused on what works so long that it comes naturally to her. From this book, it's clear that they're more alike than they might ever have thought, but Emily is very much at the beginning of that journey.

And that leads into the story that Dolgner hinted at in the first book but started to explore this time out, which is Emily's late husband Scott. Her biggest frustration in the first book was that there are so many ghosts that come to visit them at Eternal Rest but her husband isn't one. It seems that there are reasons for this. We have little idea what they are yet, but we now know that they exist and so Emily and Shay can seek a resolution to them. I'm intrigued as to how this plot thread will grow over time. It feels like a fair series arc to accompany the episode stories that are raised and resolved in a book. Let's see where it goes next month in 'Picture Perfect'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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