Demons Are a Ghoul's Best Friend by Victoria Laurie

Demons Are a Ghoul's Best Friend, the second book in Victoria Laurie's Ghost Hunter Mysteries, is, for all its serious subject matter, a fun and light-hearted read. Psychic M.J. Holliday - along with her business partners Gilley and Dr. Steven Sable, and her bird, Doc - heads to a private school on Lake Placid, where her friend's niece has just been attacked by a violent, hatchet-wielding ghost. Hatchet Jack, as the students call him, has been haunting the school for decades, and the recent construction has made him very angry. M.J. must struggle with the school's dean, who wants them to leave the case alone, in order to fight Hatchet Jack and lay his victims' tormented spirits to rest.

Victoria Laurie strikes the perfect balance between chick lit and mystery, romance and horror. The budding romantic tension between M.J. and Steven adds conflict and character development to the story without overwhelming it - and it's PG, to boot, a true rarity among paranormal and urban fantasy novels. M.J. is a strong, confident, and sympathetic character, good at her job and terribly easy for the reader to like. A professional psychic herself, Victoria Laurie has a particular insight into M.J.'s work, and provides a unique perspective among books of this kind.

Those who expect true horror or suspense will be disappointed. The ghost is somewhat frightening, but it is established in the series that while ghosts are good at slamming doors or even knocking people over, they can't do any significant damage to living beings, which takes some of the danger out of hunting Hatchet Jack. In addition, the resolution of the mystery is underwhelming. As it turns out, M.J. and her crew don't have to do much to solve the mystery of Hatchet Jack's identity and why he is haunting the school, as another character knew the answer all along and had just been keeping it secret.

The great extent of M.J.'s psychic powers, which might lead some to accuse her of being a Mary Sue, sometimes remove conflict from the plot; M.J. can sense ghosts easily and help them cross over almost immediately, whereas a less powerful character would have had to devise more varied and interesting solutions to the ghost problems. At the same time, her abilities don't seem out of place, as all of the characters are somewhat exaggerated. Steven, for example, speaks with a stereotypical foreign accent and has constant trouble with idiomatic phrases, to the extent where it seems he must be doing it on purpose. It's all part of the novel's tone, a style which works particularly well for Laurie.

Despite its shortcomings (or perhaps even because of them), Demons Are a Ghoul's Best Friend is a cute, fun, and quick summer read, more interesting than the usual chick lit but lighter than the usual paranormal/urban fantasy fare.