The bright spring weather in Old Orange is deceptive, with dark undercurrents shifting beneath the surface of the busy lives of Jane and Jerry Larkin. Jerry is restoring an old boarding house, exposing its dark history, and Jane’s busy Co-op is victimized by malicious mischief that grows more mailicious by the day. Their troubles roil together, sinister forces rising from the cheerful, root-cracked sidewalks of Old Orange, engulfing them in mystery and murder and the threatened collapse of long-held dreams.
Dark bleatings, my visible tribe! This book is a sequel to Pennies from Heaven – a cosy murder mystery starring Jane and Jerry, one of my favourite married couples. And they’re back! Following the events of the last book (in which their lives were threatened by an insufferable woman who is currently presumed dead), Jane and Jerry are on separate entrepreneurial missions. There are lots of things that can go wrong when trying to open or run a business, but it’s made much worse when malicious “pranksters” target them. It’s assumed this is random or at least not personal until Jane sees something spiteful specifically about her and her husband.
They start to wonder if that would-be killer from their recent past is really dead after all, or back to finish the job!
This book isn’t really horror and so does not fall into my usual forte, but I really enjoyed the previous book and was excited to read this. I can’t say I loved it as much as Pennies but I think that’s because Pennies was my first ever foray into this kind of murder mystery fiction and I was so pleasantly surprised to thoroughly enjoy a book from a genre that I would never normally pick up.
With that said, I did really like this one. Jane and Jerry are as awesome as ever, with the added caveat that Jerry is now affected by the trauma he endured from the last book, and so now he’s more on edge. He’s still sassy though, which is why I liked him so much in the first place.
I’d recommend this to fans of this genre, and to horror fans who like to read outside of what we normally cover here! If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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