Sharon Hays
Mysteerie Manor

Brought to you by OBS Staff member Katie

Summary:

Maryanne O’Donnell’s good friend Joan Bishop lists the Valencia Manor, a one-hundred-year-old mansion that enjoys a number of intriguing stories and its share of notoriety, Maryanne is quite seriously excited. As a serial entrepreneur, she’s kept her eye on the antiquated, if ramshackle, treasure, but when she’s allowed a sneak peak, things get weird—and dangerous. Detective Mario Ramos and Officer Steve Tratnik are brought in to investigate, and will ultimately enlist the help of a priest and a psychic to figure out who or what is causing the strange activity in the rundown manor.

Review:

Mysteerie Manor seemed right up my alley, I love crime/mystery books and of course I have a love for paranormal. I may have had my standards set a little to high with this book, I was hoping it to be more like a Heather Graham book, but it wasn’t.

I felt the book started of a little shaky, I noticed a lot of details that turned one page of info into 4 pages. Let’s take this sentence for example, “Fragrant Strawberry bath gel that transformed in to a luscious creamy foam.” I felt it wasn’t necessary to go in to that much detail.  I also noticed at the beginning quite a few spelling errors and errors with punctuation, like to many periods not enough commas. Along with missing quotation marks.

While reading things seemed to get better, although I did noticed that some area’s of the book seemed rushed. And some parts of the book flowed better than others.

I think the biggest thing about this book that is bothering me now is the ending, it had a very big abrupt and out of the blue plot twist. All of a sudden Mario and Maryanne are going out, I know through out the book it hinted that the liked each other. I felt it could have had a better transition. The other plot twist I am having an issue with is Steve becoming abusive to Joan, where in the world did that come from?

Now it may seem like I am bashing this book, when truly I’m not. This was Sharon Hays first book and I think she did a good job for it being her first. The overall plot kept me interested. I love how the house had such a big role in the story, with it’s secret past and hidden ghosts. I am definitely waiting for book two to come out.