Wild Wild West Steampunk Convention ended rather abruptly this year, when the venue kicked us out with a day and change to go due to what appears to have been a norovirus outbreak. I'm a dealer there nowadays as well as a presenter and it's the Sunday we didn't get when I'd leave my table to buy books from other authors in the vendor hall. I'm therefore rather happy that I made the off-the-cuff decision, while rushing past Beth Dolgner's table, to pay her for a couple of her series that she can sign by the time I rushed back again.

She's an Arizona author who lives in Tucson and writes paranormal cosy mysteries, usually with series in mind. I picked up the first seven books from a couple, 'Nightmare, Arizona', beginning with 2023's 'Homicide at the Haunted House', and the earlier 'Eternal Rest Bed and Breakfast' series which began with this book in 2021. She also wrote the 'Betty Boo, Ghost Hunter' quartet a decade earlier, and she has a smattering of standalones to her name too. All this was sparked by a visit to Savannah, Georgia, one of only three places in the U.S. I've visited that felt old (the others being Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana.

While the 'Nightmare, Arizona' series is set here in state, albeit in the fictional town that gives its name to the series , this one, like the 'Betty Boo' books is set back in Georgia, in the equally fictional town of Oak Hill. The Eternal Rest Bed and Breakfast is so named because it's situated right next door to the Oak Hill Memorial Garden, which is a cemetery, and it's currently run by Emily Buchanan, who inherited it from her parents. They're the ones who bought it and turned it into a B&B. She plays into the name and theme with Spirited Saturday Night packages, which include séances led by her friend Sage Clark, a purple-haired lesbian medium.

We open with one of those séances and learn in the process that Emily hopes to hear from her late husband Scott, who died in a car accident. He doesn't show, but Mrs. Thompson does, who worked there a couple of days a week, even though she's been dead for five months. I like that we're surrounded by death even before the expected murder arrives to be solved, but it feels cosy anyway. Emily is a well-drawn character, capable and doing a good job but struggling with what's needed to manage a B&B on her own. There are good reasons why that job tends to be shared by a couple. She has reliable help, though, now including Trevor Williams, an old friend from high school who's back in town and takes Mrs. Thompson's old job.

Even when strange things start happening at Eternal Rest with no rational explanation, it's all well within the bounds of comfort for Emily, her staff and especially her guests, who find it an added attraction, something to talk about when they get back home. For instance, Rhonda and Tim are a lovely couple from Kentucky who don't blow their tops when her grandma's emerald ring mysteriously disappears from the dresser. They leave and Emily finds it right in the middle of the bed when she cleans their room, so is able to call them back and return it. So the thief is a ghost? That's never happened before. Now, what's for lunch? Oh, look the furniture has been rearranged. That's cute.

Things do escalate. Both Emily and a guest called Brianne have nightmares of being choked to death and that's hardly fun. Then Trevor is injured in a microwave explosion, which prompts an emergency séance. If a ghost is involved, they're clearly very serious indeed and now they're a potential danger to Emily's guests and thus to her business. I won't continue much further into synopsis territory but I will say that the eventual murder isn't of a guest. It's a body discovered next door in a shallow grave at the Oak Hill Memorial Garden during renovations. It was under bushes, so nobody had noticed before. And that means that it's a cold case.

There isn't a lot of opportunity for us to play detective here, because, like Emily, we're stuck on the outside of the police investigation grabbing whatever snippets of information we can find whenever we can find them. However, the body was wrapped in a tellingly recognisable item of clothing, which suggests an open and shut case involving Trevor's brother Dillan, who we know disappeared when they were all in high school together. No, it's not quite that simple, which is good, but Dolgner doesn't telegraph enough for us to figure it all out ahead of time. We learn as she does and maybe get to the answer a breath before it's revealed.

Instead, we focus on character, through the community that Emily has built at Eternal Rest and the guests who effortlessly join that by merely checking in with the right attitude. Nathan and Brianne are particularly helpful, being fans of the paranormal who booked their stay because of the ghosts this B&B advertises. Sage is a very good friend indeed but she's also very good at her job, even if she can't conjure Scott up for Emily. Every séance reaches someone, except the one that comes up completely dry because all the resident ghosts are next door keeping watch in the cemetery. I absolutely adore that idea.

All in all, this is a solid first entry into a new series and it seems entirely appropriate that I dive into the rest of these books as a monthly runthrough. There are seven of them and I don't have any doubt that they're going to follow a relatively straightforward formula, but Dolgner knows full well that cosy mysteries rely on the cosy part of that genre as much as the mystery and she nails that here. I'm only one book in and I already feel like I've spent a weekend at Eternal Rest and the ghosts were as friendly as the host. Of course, I'm going to come back and check in for another weekend because I want to return to that cosy feel of belonging that's so strong that people happily hang around the place even after they die.

So, next month, I'll be back in Oak Hill to experience a 'Late Checkout'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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