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Author: Amanda Stevens, 2011.
Genre: Urban Fantasy. Ghosts. Southern Gothic.
Other Details: Paperback. 366 pages.
My name is Amelia Gray. I'm a cemetery restorer who sees ghosts. In order to protect myself from the parasitic nature of the dead, I’ve always held fast to the rules passed down from my father. But now a haunted police detective has entered my world and everything is changing, including the rules that have always kept me safe.
It started with the discovery of a young woman’s brutalized body in an old Charleston graveyard I’ve been hired to restore. The clues to the killer—and to his other victims—lie in the headstone symbolism that only I can interpret. Devlin needs my help, but his ghosts shadow his every move, feeding off his warmth, sustaining their presence with his energy. To warn him would be to invite them into my life. I’ve vowed to keep my distance, but the pull of his magnetism grows ever stronger even as the symbols lead me closer to the killer and to the gossamer veil that separates this world from the next. - synopsis from author's website.
This proved to be a very satisfying urban fantasy with a different twist on the ghost whisperer theme as according to her Papa's rules Amelia has to avoid ghosts, which she has done since childhood. Yet now she begins to push against those restrictions. It also was quite an interesting mystery with a very attractive and tormented police detective overseeing the investigations. The attraction between them had complications that were not all tied up by the end of the novel leaving me wanting more. The novel's rich Southern Gothic ambiance also had me hooked.
However, as eager as I was to get my paws on the next in the series I discovered that only Book 1 has been published in the UK, meaning that I needed to order them second-hand from the USA.
