Reviewed by Cheryl K

TITLE: The Haunted Hotel

SERIES: Crawshanks Guide to Mischievous Spectres & Spirits Book 1

AUTHOR: Vawn Cassidy

PUBLISHER: Self published

LENGTH: 277 pages

RELEASE DATE: August 24, 2024

BLURB:

Have a frightfully good stay…

Morgan Ashton-Drake hasn’t given his ancestral home in Yorkshire a second thought in decades. He has a great life in the States, running his stepfather’s hotel empire with his brother. So, what if he’s all work and no play. He’s not missing out on anything important.

But when a suspicious death and rather public scandal at his childhood home forces Morgan to return to England for the first time in years, he’s not keen to confront his past. What he didn’t count on was the seriously cute little blonde disaster who seems to be single-handedly running his eccentric grandfather’s hotel.

Ellis Sparks has worked at the Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel since he was sixteen and he loves it from the bottom of his soul. Always the eternal optimist, he’s never met a frown he can’t turn upside down; that is, until he meets Morgan Ashton-Drake, the grumpy grandson of his employer.

With the hotel in danger of closing, and convinced Morgan is the only one who can help to save it, the resident ghosts decide to try their ghostly hand at a little matchmaking as an incentive to get him to stay. After all, how hard can it be to get a grumpy workaholic to fall in love with a twinky ray of sunshine?

From the creator of Dead Serious comes this hilarious grumpy/sunshine spin off which will leave you wanting to book your own room at The Ashton-Drake Manor House Hotel.

REVIEW:

What a brilliant spinoff. This book is the first book in the new series and can be read in as a standalone.  It would be helpful though if you read Dead Serious Case #4, Professor Prometheus Plume, as backstory from that book is mentioned.

The worldbuilding is so good, the beauty of this haunted hotel makes the for the best backdrop. I see so many possibilities in the future.

Character development is so good.  We have Ellis, who we met in the previous series, the brilliant man that is trying run and save the hotel at the same time.  Then we meet Morgan, the seriously grumpy workaholic. The side characters are also very detailed and have a life of their own – so to speak.  Vawn imbues so much in all of her characters, you become wholly invested in the story.  From the recluse Grandfather/Hotel Owner to Stanley an agent of the Bureau of Domestic Hauntings.

There is so much humor in this story.  I have found it takes a serious amount of talent to write humor.  If not done correctly it can really tank a book. The lengths the ghosts go to, to bring Ellis and Morgan together are so funny. Missing or moved furniture, missing clothes, incorrect hotel room labels.  It’s all so much fun.  But there are also some serious elements to deal with as well. The hotel is on the brink of ruin and in desperate need of saving.

Will Stanley banish the ghosts to a blackhole? Will Morgan remember his childhood at the hotel? Will Ellis and Morgan survive the matchmaking of the ghosts? Well, if you know me, I’m not going to tell you.  You need to run out and grab your eBook copy of this book and find out for yourself.

I highly recommend this new series and can’t wait to read the next book in this series.

RATING:

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