This third book in Beth Dolgner's 'Eternal Rest Bed & Breakfast' series continues things in much the same way that its predecessors established but it's not feeling formulaic yet, even working to a template. Sure, both Emily Buchanan and her Eternal Rest Bed & Breakfast are once again at the heart of a murder, but it's abstracted neatly through the introduction of an arts festival that arrives in the small Georgia town of Oak Hill for one week each year.

Just as hotel rooms in Tucson empty out of gem show vendors and visitors every year in time to fill back up with book festival vendors and visitors, it makes total sense that Eternal Rest would fill up annually with Oak Hill Arts Festival vendors and visitors. Of course, it's smaller than most hotels, so Emily's guests during the festival tend to just artists who stay for the duration. They are an agreeably varied set this year, naturally, as tradition decrees.

Kat Mason looks rather like my sister without the tattoos, meaning that she's far from a typical sight in small town Georgia, with half her head shaved and the other braided and beaded. She's a regular and she's building an art installation at the Oak Hill Memorial Garden next door. Jake and Selena Frye are a couple who both paint, but in entirely different styles; this is their fourth year at Eternal Rest. Marianne Callahan is an avant-garde sculptor who's staying there for the first time and she's as short as Gregory Van Breda is tall. He reminded me of an even taller John Malkovich, saying little and only ever in a very soft voice.

It also makes sense, I guess, that, with every one of her guests working the Arts Festival all day every day, Emily has free time to volunteer at the event herself. That may be a little stretch, as she's just hired a new assistant, this time from a temp agency given recent history, so has little time to train her before she's off to work the festival. She therefore gives Gretchen pretty free rein to do her brand-new job without any real supervision. That felt a little odd to me, but it's a minor concern in the grand scheme of things.

After all, everyone in Oak Hill seems to be involved in the festival, which practically takes over the town. Emily's friend and medium, Sage Clark, has her own shop but she's booked a booth for the festival to read fortunes. Sage's wife, Jen Clark, whose day job is at the Oak Hill Chamber of Commerce, handles the volunteers at the festival. Emily's former assistant, Trevor Williams, an important character in the first book, is there too, as his company does the graphic design. This pervasiveness underlines how much Oak Hill is a small-town community, a feeling I'm starting to forget after twenty years living in Phoenix.

The good news is that none of this year's guests are murdered. The bad news is that it's one of Emily's previous guests, Robert Gaines, who seems to succumb to a heart attack in his booth. I say seems because Sage doesn't believe that from the outset and the police soon follow suit. It was poison; he ingested something toxic, presumably without realising it, which means another murder for Roger Martin, at the festival, out of uniform, to investigate. Emily, once more, has a role to play, because the initial connection that he used to stay at Eternal Rest is just the start.

Gaines is a far more palatable version of Jaxon Knight-MacGinn, murdered in the second book, 'Late Checkout'. He appears to be much a less objectionable human being, however much drama there is with his ex-wife, but his art has taken a dark turn that has upset most of the town. You see, he's a photographer, but what comes out of his camera is only the beginning to his work. He then manipulates the images, adding to them and changing them into something else. And the theme he's following this year is the dark side of small town life, more specifically Oak Hill.

Our first glimpse of that is a young lady named Jess, who Emily finds weeping in the grass. She's a model in town and Robert took her photograph the previous year, then manipulated it into a sort of "Frankenstein's Lady of the Night", which she's only just seen for the first time. She feels humiliated and her friend Caleb Watson is outraged, neatly adding to the suspect list when the murder comes around. There's no shortage of people upset by Robert's art.

In fact, Emily could add herself to that list as well because she soon sees a manipulated photo of Eternal Rest that she absolutely hates. It turns her calm and welcoming bed and breakfast into a traumatising set in a horror movie. And, of course, the list grows with every image, given the focus on Oak Hill and the growing number of people who see themselves or their houses turned into something nightmarish. Frankly, I have a feeling I'd love his work so much I'd probably want to commission him to manipulate my house, but what matters here is that those touched by it in this book don't love it and they don't love it with emphasis.

So that's two connections. Robert used to stay at Eternal Rest and he used it as the subject for a sinister picture. How about a third? Of course, a bunch of people snapped photos of the festival because that's what people do and, just as naturally, when one of its artists turns up dead, they look through them to see if they took one of him. That's what Trevor does and what's notable is not that he finds Robert but that he finds Robert's ghost. Before long, the police have a slew of photos taken of Robert's booth, in all of which Robert's ghost seems to be pointing at a certain picture and I'm sure I don't need to tell you which.

This is a great setup for a cosy supernatural murder mystery and it allows Dolgner to explore a few different angles. There's the murder, of course, which needs to be solved, but it's a way for her to expand both the town and Emily's growing abilities further. We meet more locals and we spend more time with ones we've previously met, like Jen Clark, now more than just Sage's wife, and Trish from Grainy Day Bakery. Det. Hernandez even asks Emily and Sage in to consult, which is telling. And Emily has to step up her game, because Sage can't reach Robert at all. Ironically, the trigger for Emily to make a breakthrough is her mother buying the picture of Eternal Rest for Emily, not realising how much she despises it.

I've enjoyed this series from the outset, but this one feels just right. 'Sweet Dreams', the first book, wasn't as much of a mystery that we could solve, partly because it had the second task of introducing us to everything. 'Late Checkout' was absolutely a mystery we could solve, at least to try, but it was flavoured by an absolute nightmare of a character. Of course, we're meant to despise him, just like everybody else, but Dolgner set that up so well that we were almost glad to see him dead, reducing how much we cared about finding his killer. Here, we're given plenty of opportunity to solve the murder ourselves and it's of someone we have sympathy for. Sure, he's upset a lot of people but he doesn't seem to have done it deliberately.

The more I read, the more I want to keep reading, which makes it a good thing that I have all of the seven 'Eternal Rest Bed and Breakfast' books lined up. Next month, 'Scenic Views', which is, perhaps, where Emily and Sage make a breakthrough in the series arc about why they can't talk to Emily's late husband, Scott. Let's find out in August! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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