Katie O’Keene, $0.99, ISBN 978-1005742683
Paranormal Cozy Mystery, 2021

Oh boy, is this a game of spot the cliché?

Let’s see: a glamorous 70-year old mom that runs around with new boyfriends and tries to pair her daughter up with various blokes, a Mousy Daughter that feels dowdy compared to her mother, this daughter coming back to visit the mother only to realize that the older woman is off having fun elsewhere…

Well, the mousy daughter, our heroine Lindsey Dell, can communicate with ghosts, so that’s something, I guess.

Katie O’Keene’s Haunted Hashbrowns is both a testament of how to end a story on a perfect note and how really tired sarcastic-speak can cause a story to feel like a chore to read.

Let’s start with the second one. Seriously, I think Joss Whedon ruined an entire generation, or maybe two, of writers, because everyone thinks it’s perfectly fine for characters to crack one-liners at the drop of a hat.

There’s an art to this, you know, one that Mr Whedon can do well but many wannabes can’t, and it’s all in the balance between feels and sarcasm. One can completely tip to an extreme and end up with characters that can’t stop cracking one-liners even when they are faced with genuine tragedy, thus coming off as complete psychopaths. That or go the other extreme and end up with “good” characters that come off instead as bitter and incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else—killjoy narcissists, in other words.

Fortunately, Ms O’Keene finds that balance in the second half of this short little thing, when people start behaving like actual human beings, and that’s the best part of the story.

Even better, the mystery is one that can be perfectly resolved within the length of this story, and it ends on just the right note. There is no unnecessary aftermath, just the story ending on like a mic drop that makes me want to jump up from my seat and applaud.

While I am deducting one oogie for the first half of this thing, which is full of tired tropes and even more tired sarcastic humor, the second half is very enjoyable. It was as if the author had decided to stop trying too hard to write a formulaic story and just let her id runs its zany course.

I really enjoy that second half of the story, so while this one is a three-oogie read, officially, I actually like it far more than a typical story of a similar score. Talk about the author putting a spell on me—sure, she did it a little late, but I’m glad she did!

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