This book was interesting but it was MESSY and BUSY.

I had to take notes to keep track of this dog’s breakfast plot and unnecessarily large cast of characters.
There was way too much going on here and it overwhelmed a pretty interesting murder mystery and original concept. I was disappointed that the author went way too crazy introducing NUMEROUS side characters and side plots; she really lost focus in this.

For named characters we had:

> the undertaker family (The Astons) siblings; Ambrose, Julius, Phoebe, and their grandfather (this gave HBO’s Six Feet Under but Victorian vibes…loved that)
> the investigative team: the police detective Harland Stone (love interest to Phoebe), the private detective Bennet Martin (2nd love interest to Phoebe), the coroner Dr. Tavish McSomething-or-other, the investigative reporter Lilly whatserface (love interest to Julius AND Ambrose), and Detective Gilbert the hapless partner to Stone.
> Mourning Clothing store storyline: the seamstress Violet I forget the last name of (2nd love interest to Julius) and her brother Tim or Tom.
> the vexed vixens: Kate & Emily, lady friend group to Phoebe -who had no plot significance whatsoever - Lilly was also a member.

Why do we need so many named characters with backstories in this? It was way too confusing and overwhelming. I didn’t know who was important to the plot and who wasn’t.

In addition to that we had so much head hopping, with POVs (written in third person) from at least seven of the named characters and two potential murder victims. I went into this thinking it was about a mortician and her sixth sense giving her clues to solve crimes but honestly that was a very teeny tiny part of this book. Phoebe was actually barely in the book at all.

The murder mystery was good, it was less of a whodunnit and more chasing down and uncovering the culprit who is known early on, and that was ok, I actually really enjoyed the investigation side of this. But did we need not one, but TWO love triangles??

Holy hell! Tone it down!

I d the scenes with the detective, I d the female reporter and I d the side romance between the seamstress and Julius; everything else needed to be cut out and saved for another book. We did not need the private detective character at all, or the vexed vixens or for the blurb and title to mislead us that this story was in any way about the lady mortician and her ghost friends. It was not. One ghost appeared at the beginning and he didn’t offer any insight whatsoever into the case. This paranormal detail seemed to be the hook of this series and yet it was completely under-utilized and had it been omitted the story would have been much the same.

Ugh. Colour me disappointed. I really d this author’s book Murder at the Freak Show and her last series was mostly enjoyable, but this book needed more focus and less of everything else.

I will read the next one because sometimes first books in series are a little crazy with the details, hopefully she can clean it up and keep focused on the murder mystery and *crosses fingers* one side romance and make the ghosts a central part of this PLEASE or stop pushing it in the blurb entirely
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