A Murder at Midnight by Ellie Alexander: A Ghost Hunt Gone Deadly (ARC Review)

Read time: 4 minutes

📱📖 Read on Kindle 📃 272 pages
Genre: Cozy Mystery 🏷️ Storm Publishing
ARC by NetGalley

Book Blurb:

It’s autumn in Redwood Grove, and Annie and Fletcher are juggling their bookstore, the Secret Bookcase, with a growing caseload at the Novel Detectives. When a popular ghost hunter sets his sights on the store for an overnight episode of his hit show Sleeping with Spirits, complete with haunted tours for guests, it looks like the perfect publicity boost. But when one of the crew is found dead, Annie and Fletcher realize they’re facing something far more dangerous than an angry poltergeist. Now it’s up to the Novel Detectives to unmask the real culprit and put the otherworldly rumors to rest before anyone else gets hurt.

Let’s talk … murder!!!

Four books into the series, Annie and Fletcher are well rooted in their detective agency and quite tight with the cops to handle crimes on their own. In this mystery, a ghost hunting team comes to visit their bookstore. Hunting for ghosts ends up with a dead body, and it is up to Annie and Fletcher to find out who is the killer.

The mystery itself is pretty neat. I would never have guessed the way the killer operated. It was pretty smart. My issue with the book though was the free rein Annie and Fletcher were given in this whole investigation. I understand that both of them are registered detectives, but that shouldn’t mean the police should entirely rely on Annie and Fletcher for all of the witness interviews and figuring out what happened, and the police would come at the end to arrest the culprit. That doesn’t sit well with me.

However, I really liked the character development in this book. The cast and crew of the Novel Detective team really develop over the book’s span, and the story arc of Hal’s Agatha Christie ancestry that is overarching this set of books is also very intriguing. I am curious how this story arc will end. In the meanwhile, the detective duo could do with a little less free rein for authenticity.

Would I recommend it?

Four books in, A Murder at Midnight still delivers a genuinely clever whodunit, I never saw the killer’s method coming, and that alone makes it worth picking up. The character work here is the real highlight, especially watching the Novel Detectives team grow and the Agatha Christie ancestry thread deepen. My one gripe is how much free rein the police hand Annie and Fletcher, it stretches believability a bit thin for my taste. Still, this is a fun entry in a series I keep coming back to. Mark your calendar for October 13, and add this one to your TBR.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

5 Book Recommendations

• Murder by the Book by Lauren Elliott (Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery #1) If the bookstore setting is what hooked you here, start Lauren Elliott’s Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery series with Murder by the Book, another amateur sleuth running her own shop and stumbling straight into murder.

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• The Bookshop Murder by Merryn Allingham (A Flora Steele Mystery #1) For more bookshop-owner sleuthing with a historical twist, try The Bookshop Murder, the first Flora Steele mystery set in 1950s Sussex.

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• Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House by M.C. Beaton (Agatha Raisin #14) Since A Murder at Midnight leans into the haunted angle, Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House scratches that same itch, with Agatha investigating a supposedly haunted house that turns out to hide a very real killer.

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• Muffin to Fear by Victoria Hamilton (Merry Muffin Mysteries) Want more ghost-hunting-TV-crew chaos? Muffin to Fear brings a Haunt Hunt-style crew to a castle, and it goes about as well as you’d expect.

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• The Christie Curse by Victoria Abbott (Book Collector Mysteries #1) And if Hal’s Agatha Christie ancestry thread is what you’re most curious about, The Christie Curse leans directly into Christie lore, with a rare-book collector caught up in a mystery tied to the Queen of Crime herself.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

Curious About the Killer’s Method? Tell Me Your Theories

Ghost hunters, a bookstore, and a body that wasn’t part of the show. I need to know, would you have caught the killer before Annie and Fletcher did? Drop your theories (or your own ghost-hunting-gone-wrong stories) in the comments!

Book Links

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