Ruby Young’s new Boston apartment comes with all the usual perks. Windows facing the brick wall of the next-door building. Heat that barely works. A malfunctioning buzzer. Noisy neighbors. A dead body on the sidewalk outside. And of course, a ghost.
Since Cordelia Graves died in her apartment a few months ago, she’s kept up her residency, despite being bored out of her (non-tangible) skull and frustrated by her new roommate. When her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake Macintyre, is shot and killed in an apparent mugging gone wrong outside their building, Cordelia is convinced there’s more to it and is determined to bring his killer to justice.
Unfortunately, Cordelia, being dead herself, can’t solve the mystery alone. She has to enlist the help of the obnoxiously perky, living tenant of her apartment. Ruby is twenty, annoying, and has never met a houseplant she couldn’t kill. But she also can do everything Cordelia can’t, from interviewing suspects to researching Jake on the library computers that go up in a puff of smoke if Cordelia gets too close. As the roommates form an unlikely friendship and get closer to the truth about Jake’s death, they also start to uncover other dangerous secrets.

IN A NUTSHELL
‘A New Lease Of Death‘ was a gentle entertainment. It was too low-key to be a thriller, too cosy to be horror and too simple to be a mystery AND YET it was a lot of fun to listen to. What I enjoyed most was watching a friendship grow between the naturally solitary, forty-someting.-and-now-deceased, native Bostonian Cordelia and the perky, outgoing barely-twenty, first-time-ilving alone, new-to-the-city Ruby. They made a convincing and engaging odd couple, not just because one of them was dead but because they saw the world so differently. I also had fun watching Cordelia. trying to figure out what she could and couldn’t do now that she’s a ghost who most people (including Ruby) can neither see nor hear. Misogyny in general and male violence towards women in particular powers the plot. It is treated seriously and realistically but it isn’t allowed to overwhelm the resiliance of the women or drain away the quiet humour with which they face the world. The mystery was straightforward and served mostly to bring Cordelia and Ruby together. I’m looking forward to them working together on their next challenge.

I bought ‘A New Lease On Death’ because I was intrigued by the idea of a young woman and the ghost of the recently deceased but still very much in residence former tenant of the Boston apartment she’s just moved into, playing amateur sleuth to discover who shot their neighbour to death on the doorstep.

From the first scene where Cordelia (the recently deceased member of the duo) is sitting in the snow next to the body of the man in pyjama pants and a bullet hole in his forehead, waiting for his ghost to emerge and recognise his altered state, I knew I was in for a story that was more original than I’d expected. One of the things I loved about this story was Cordelia’s exploration of her new found ghostly state. She’s constantly testing the limits of her abilities, which she thinks are powered by what she can convince herself to believe is possible. I liked that Cordelia’s (after) life wasn’t unproblematic. If she loses concentration she drifts back into memories. If she pushes too hard she slips into a sort of dream state until she can recharge. She can (sometimes) move things but she (mostly) remains invisible and inaudible. I liked the way Cordelia’s mind worked. She was an introvert from a tough background who valued having her own space with her own books and the freedom not to have to share.

Ruby, the living half of the duo, was a little overwhelming. She’s very young )not old enough to drink in Boston) is new to Boston and is living alone for the first time. She is an irrepressibly, energetically cheerful extrovert who vocalises every thought that crosses her mind.

Part of the humour comes from how Cordelia and Ruby view one another. Cordelia is astonished that Ruby has never learnt to read cursive. Ruby sees forty-something Cordelia as having old lady habits like buying print media and keeping houseplants. The story is told entirely in chapters written from either Cordelia’s or Ruby’s point of view, constantly highlights the differences in their perception of people and events and tracks their growing connection with each other. The effect was amplified in the audiobook by having a narrator for each character.

The tone was light, upbeat and sprinkled with humour. The content was darker than I’d expected. The plot was driven by misogyny and male violence towards women. These things weren’t minimised but I was never in doubt that, between them, Cordelia and Ruby would find a way to prevail. I was surprised (and pleased) to see that part of Cordelia’s way of prevailing was to get pretty good at violence towards men when they deserved it.

The murder mystery wasn’t complicated but it did give Cordelia and Ruby something to focus on together. The resolution was dramatic and made sense. I was mildly disappointed that the second mystery (how Cordelia REALLY met her death) didn’t get past being seeded in this book. Still, it gives me something to look forward to in the next Supernatural Mysteries.

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