TAXI ~ Take a Ride with Dead Girl Blues by Joyce & Jim Lavene

Welcome to my stop for A Taxi for the Dead series, Dead Girl Blues and Broken Hearted Ghoul, by Joyce and Jim Lavene.

Dead Girl Blues
By Joyce and Jim Lavene

• Genre – Cozy Mystery (PARANORMAL)

MY REVIEW

Dead Girl Blues combines two of my favorite genres, mystery and the paranormal. A ghostly twist here, a sorcerers twist there, zombies everywhere, but you would not recognize them. They look just like you and me.

I did not realize this was Book II and I have not read Book I, The Broken Hearted Ghoul. My enjoyment of the story did not suffer because of it. I loved the thought of a zombie bounty hunter and now I will go back and read Book I.

Skye and her cohort, Debbie, earned money working for Abraham Lincoln Jones by picking up LEPs – Life Extended People, or as she calls them, zombies.

Skye is dead, but she still feels the heat and carries a gun. It would hurt if she was shot, but she would heal. She had feelings, just like a living human being. Her heart still beats. Skye is a zombie bounty hunter. Did you see that coming?

She was a Nashville police officer for ten years before her death. She’d bargained with Abe for twenty more years of life to raise her daughter in exchange for working for him.

Skye and her husband had been killed in a car accident, but theirs were not the only mysterious deaths. Abe wanted her to investigate the death of his sorcerer and she was quietly investigating her own. There is something weird in the woods. Of course there is. LOL

When the LEPs started vanishing, I wondered how much more trouble she could get into.

Life was simpler when she could just take out a gun and shoot someone.

I would like to do that myself sometimes, so I am already relating to her before I even become fully involved. 🙂

Skye’s taxi fares are zombies. When their twenty years are up, she collects them and delivers them to the morgue. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. If you don’t, it is not pleasant at all.

A zombie bounty hunter, sorcerers, ghosts, the undead, werewolves, shapeshifters…

Dead Girl Blues is a zombie novel with a twist that is new to me. I love finding something unique, original and slightly funny. Imagine a zombie doing a murder investigation. It put a smile on my face, how about yours?

Instead of being horrified and creeped out, I looked at it in a “Supernatural” way, with a humorous slant. Magic and shenanigans keep Skye busy, but she needs some answers to “save” herself. I am siding with Lucas, a sorcerer, against the others more powerful than they are. Most sorcerers fight amongst themselves, but not Lucas. Maybe whatever happened that made him lose his memory was for the better. He is stuck to Skye, like glue.

This quote sums up Skye’s thoughts:

Life was so much less complicated when I was alive.”

I have an idea of what is going on and I am curious to see if I am right.

I know what I want to happen, but is it possible?

And the story goes on…

I received a copy of the book in return for an honest review.

4 Stars

SYNOPSIS

When Nashville cop Skye Mertz and her husband, Jacob, are killed in a wreck, Skye is given the opportunity to come back for twenty years to raise her five-year-old daughter, Kate. With her ghostly mother-in-law’s help, Skye hopes to be there until Kate is old enough to take care of herself.

But three years into her twenty-year service to Abraham Lincoln Jones, the man who gave her the extra time, Skye is beginning to think life might have been easier before she died.

Abe asks her to investigate the murder of his sorcerer, Harold the Great, a man who was a victim of too many snakes. And the Life Extended People (LEPs – a nice term for zombies) who work for Abe have begun turning into ghosts and disappearing. Only Lucas, the possibly evil, amnesiac sorcerer who lives with Skye and her family, can save her from being the next victim of the deadly curse.

To make matters more complicated, Skye has found a lead in solving the riddle of her husband’s death. She has never believed Jacob died as a result of the crash, but hasn’t been able to prove it. Many other people have lost their lives in the same lonely stretch of highway that he did three years before. Skye goes against Abe’s express wishes to discover the truth with a crazy man bent on vengeance.

About The Authors

Joyce and Jim Lavene write award-winning, bestselling mystery fiction as themselves, J.J. Cook, and Ellie Grant. They have written and published more than 70 novels for Harlequin, Berkley, Amazon, and Gallery Books along with hundreds of non-fiction articles for national and regional publications. They live in rural North Carolina with their family.

Author Links: Website / Facebook / Amazon / Twitter

First Book in Series
Broken Hearted Ghoul (Taxi for the Dead Paranormal Mysteries) (Volume 1)

Amazon / Goodreads