I knew I was going to have a hard time with my Spooky Book-tober pick this year. I don’t read horror. If I do, my brain doesn’t let me sleep for weeks. So, what’s a girl to do? Imagine my delight when I discovered THE KINDRED SPIRITS SUPPER CLUB by Amy E. Reichert. A light romance novel brimming with ghosts and their unfinished business? Yes, please! A match made in heaven, or at least an afterlife of sorts.

The story features Sabrina Monroe, a former journalist who’s moved back to her tiny Wisconsin hometown to recover from burnout and a bad breakup. Opposite Sabrina is Ray Jasper III, an ambitious NYC realtor-turned-restauranteur who takes an interest in renovating and running a local supper club. The supporting cast of characters includes Molly (a ghost from the prohibition era who’s also Sabrina’s best friend), Erika Hendricks (Sabrina’s lifelong rival and her current boss), Lucy (Ray’s sardonic sister), plus a host of other ghosts and living persons that will make you wish you could jump into the pages and join them for cheese curds and a beer.

The women in Sabrina’s family have an ability to see and speak with ghosts. They use this unusual gift to help the recently deceased with unfinished business so that they can move on in the afterlife. For Sabrina, this gift became more like a curse early on in her life, earning her ridicule from her peers and a badly broken heart. She’s been away for a long time, busy with a life she thought she wanted, but now she’s back home, haunted by her past and the ghosts that keep showing up for her help. She tells herself she’ll leave at the end of summer, until she begins to find herself falling in love with Ray, a man who feels strangely tied to the town, like he might want to stay there forever. Can she face her own unfinished business so that she can move on with her life? Or will she, like so many of us do, remain stuck in her own head, unable and unwilling to reveal the injuries of the past in order that they might be properly bandaged?

Suffice it to say, in facing my challenges with Spooky Book-tober, I am so glad I found this entertaining, end-of-summer romance. Per its genre there are a couple of lightly steamy scenes, but it generally is very rom-com-like. 

Buy it HERE. I hope it will lovingly haunt your dreams forever.