Customer Reviews

Killer Karma

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A man wakes in a parking garage with the horrible memory of being murdered. Or, is it a dream?

So begins Lee Killough's KILLER KARMA, a doozy of a mystery, about Detective Cole Dunavan who realizes he's a ghost far sooner than he remembers who he is. Having a curious and ordered mind, Dunavan begins to notice patterns in his random memories and their subsequent associations until he is able to piece together his own biography. But he remains unclear about why he's been pulled back to this world rather than simply dying.

Being a ghost comes with other challenges: how can you turn the page in a police report if you can't move anything with substance? How do you communicate with people? How can you ride an elevator to the right floor in a high rise building without the ability to push a button? Killough masterfully brings up and solves these problems in believable ways.

The mysteries of Dunavan's murder - and what happened to one of his new informants - form the core of the book. But even after Dunavan has solved these questions-he still has to figure out how to prove the answers, bring the criminals to justice and console those who have suffered the most.

Killough has created more than a paranormal police procedural here. This is a novel about love and redemption, about friendship and possibility. Any reader who enjoys a good mystery with strong psychological elements, compelling characters, and a fascinating storyline will relish this one. I highly recommend it.

He finds himself in a parking garage not knowing who he is but certain that someone murdered him. It takes him a while to realize that he is Detective Cole Donovan of the San Francisco Police Department working on an arson and burglary case. He realizes he is a ghost when nobody sees or hears him and by his ability to walk through walls and doors. He was meeting an informant Sara Benay and he hoped that she had enough information to take the owner of Flaxx Enterprises Donald Flaxx down because in one of his stores that was torched a foreman died, making him an accessory to murder.

His informant Sara has disappeared and since his body has not been found the police think they ran off together. Cole wants his wife to know the truth about the meetings with Sara, not what the police think. Using his ghostly powers, he convinces his former partner Razor, once he gets over the shock of seeing Cole as a ghost, to help him find out why he was killed, who murdered him and how it relates to Flaxx Enterprises. Even when Cole discovers who the killer is, Razor has no way of obtaining a warrant because he can't explain how he came by the knowledge.

Lee Killough has written a totally enthralling and spellbinding paranormal police procedural. The protagonist is a ghost who bumbles and fumbles as he learns to use his ghostly powers once he discovers what they are. His instincts and experience help him find the perpetrators and he uses spirit tricks to rattle the various suspects into making mistakes. KILLER KARMA is an enjoyable and entertaining reading experience that is destined for this reviewer's keeper shelf.

Harriet Klausner

A man wakes up in a parking garage with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He quickly realises that he is dead and a ghost who can only affect the material world in the smallest ways. However, if he is to move on he must find out how he died and who killed him.

This is a police procedural novel with a difference. While the Ghost-Detective isn't a totally new idea its more often seen in movies rather than novels. Killough has managed to put together a story of murder, arson and mistaken assumptions that reads at a good pace and is populated with interesting and likeable characters. The story is not padded out and ends on a note which makes it plain that this is a stand alone novel. Recommended if you like police procedural novels, and to top it off Meisha Merlin has produced another hardcover of good quality construction, which is always a nice thing to handle in a book.

I tried to limit myself to one chapter per night; I wanted to savor this one. I don't ordinarily read a lot of mysteries, but the ghost twist pulled me in. There aren't many first-person ghost novels out there, and I was really looking forward to reading this one - and it didn't disappoint me. It was also a different sort of twist, with different "rules" applying to this particular ghost, all of which contributed well to the story.