Featured Book: Christa's Ghost
This month, my Featured Book is paranormal comedy Christa's Ghost. This features a quirky and obstinate middle-aged woman called Christa who is murdered in mysterious and very annoying circumstances alongside her husband. Being dead is awfully irritating in all sorts of ways. However, this minor setback isn’t going to stop Christa (nothing ever has …) and she’s determined to find out who killed them, if it’s the last thing she does. Which in many ways, of course, it is.
What she doesn’t anticipate during her investigations is finding out more about herself and how people saw her. Oh, so much more! Christa has always thought she was a relatively good person and had a good number of friends and acquaintances, but now she’s dead. And being dead means nobody can see her and, to her horror, she finds out what her friends think of her and it definitely isn’t what she’s expecting to hear! Could she have been trickier to deal with than she’d ever imagined? Perish the thought … It’s certainly difficult to hear anyone’s real views when you weren’t supposed to hear them – but though it can be painful, what friends say can make you think more clearly about your life. Self-knowledge can be both a helpful and a dangerous thing.
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Something else that surprises Christa in the afterlife is how much more flexible she is now she doesn’t have a physical form. In life she could always rely on her body to take her wherever she wanted to go, and to do – more or less – whatever she asked of it. Though of course, not being in the first flush of youth by a long measure when alive meant that everything slowed down a little … But now she’s dead, she has a lot more power and is very excited by what she can do, and more than a little startled as well. Plus there’s a whole lot of new things to discover and new things she has to learn. Being dead is really the most exciting thing to happen to Christa for a long time and she can’t help but wish she’d chosen to step out of her proverbial comfort zone a lot more when alive. She would certainly have had a more enjoyable life if she had done. It’s a bit too late now though … Isn’t it?
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The third surprise for Christa is how much solid work is done by the police, and how committed the whole police team are to resolving the murder. She’s also surprised by how tedious some of the work turns out to be when pursuing every avenue of enquiry. She had never realised there was so much to be done in such a short amount of time (before the ‘trail’ goes cold). And, from a starting position of being cynical about the police’s ability to solve the crime, she does come to appreciate their efforts (whilst still believing she can do better!). And, of course, still wondering why they are really all so terribly young … The police aren’t quite – or indeed at all – what all those TV crime dramas make them out to be.
Most of all, Christa learns that being dead doesn’t mean you can’t do new things and understand more about other people, and also about yourself and how you tick. Which is a great lesson for us all while we’re alive!
Find out more about Christa and her criminal investigation here.
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