Where Something Happens, Eventually

The Case of the Green-Dressed Ghost by Lucy Banks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, it's okay. But I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped to.

The main character is such a sad sack, so useless, it's really hard to root for him or care what happens to him. He's supposed to be a young man out of college, but he reads like a nerdy kid in an old MG novel, as he is afraid of everything and terrible at everything and hardly tries to change how everyone sees him. This old-fashioned kid's-book feeling is reinforced by the pointless, childish bickering among the other characters, who behave like a dysfunctional family out on vacation. (Also, the revelations emerging from his mother's death put me in mind of those books where a kid inherits an old house and has adventures in the woods or reading old books in the attic or something. But it's not that cool.) They're all so bad at their Scooby-and-the-gang jobs one wonders how they didn't go out of business long before Kester showed up.

The main plot sounds fun, at least in the blurb, but there's very little to it, and 90% of it is saved up for the last few pages. TBH, I finished it because I wanted to know what happened, not because I enjoyed reading it. Okay, I did like pages here and there, including the decent bit of action at the end, for which I bumped it up from the below average 2 stars ("I didn't like this") I was gonna give it to a respectable ("not too bad--you might like it") 3 stars. It's possible, now that the stage is set, that the following books (are there sequels yet?) would be more to my taste, but I don't think I'll make the effort.

Decent story. Not terrible. Not awesome. Others may like it. Good cover, anyway.

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