For deeply dark and haunting, try reading Joyce Carol Oates. If you tend toward the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe might do the trick. Do clever, plot-spinning detectives keep you reading all night? Agatha Christie's a sure thing. But if it is a light little mystery you're craving, one that doesn't demand much of you while you wait out the lingering summer heat in the pool, Sue Ann Jaffarian's "Ghost a la Mode" might satisfy like a cool cherry cola, albeit, the ice half-melted.
Jaffarian, author of the Odelia Gray mysteries, has launched a new series with "Ghost a la Mode," her first Ghost of Granny Apples mystery. The story is sweet, the plot is not particularly effervescent and the denouement is as surprising as ash blowing into your soda during a Camp Pendleton fire.
Nonetheless, Jaffarian's chatty tone wends a pleasantly accessible path for the reader through her combination ghost story-murder mystery and into the quaint community of Julian, an old gold rush town cum apple pie emporium and weekend getaway for today's urban dwellers.
This familiar haunt of many San Diego County residents should give the book a nice boost among local readers, and it would not be completely undeserved. Jaffarian has done a nifty job of incorporating Julian's history into her tale of unresolved ghosts, uncanny psychics, unsolved murders and unhappy divorcees, while handily introducing some characters, alive and dead, to carry the series forward.
Although Jaffarian's ghosts are neither frightening nor fanciful, she does create in them a nice foil for her apparition-resistant protagonist, Emma Whitecastle, who, amid an unpleasant divorce, is seeking disengaged calm. However, at the prodding of Granny Apples, her vaporous great-great-great-grandmother, Emma inevitably pursues a 100-year-old mystery that does a passable job of holding the reader's attention.
Jaffarian's prose is plain, simple and to the point, perhaps serving adequately for her genre, but for the more demanding reader, the lack of suspense might render the book a bit boring. Jaffarian also has a disconcerting tendency to drop an article here or there or misuse pronouns in her narrative, the latter requiring the reader to stop dead in his or her tracks and consider the identity of the "he" or "she" to whom the author is referring. Alternately, she sometimes overuses proper nouns, occasionally lending her narrative the unrefined cadence of a bubblegum chewer.
So, Jaffarian (appearing Saturday afternoon at the Vista Library as part of the county library's "Page One: Celebration of the Written Word" book festival) will never be an Oates or a Poe or a Christie, but she's not trying to be. She does, in fact, have a following, and sometimes the melting ice in an overly sweet soda results in a palatable little diversion on a hot afternoon.
Kit-Bacon Gressitt is a writer and editor and the host of Fallbrook's monthly Writers Read open mic readings of poetry and prose. She can be reached at kbgressitt@aol.com.
"Ghost a la Mode: A Ghost of Granny Apples Mystery"
** (out of four)
Author: Sue Ann Jaffarian
Publisher: Midnight Ink
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 287
Price: $14.95
