So what's the deal with these out-of-order book reviews, someone asks. Gentle Readers, from mid-June to the first of August, a piece of the wiring in the Internet connection here was apparently completely fried. It seems all I've been getting here is wireless connectivity, all along, but the wi-fi has been broadcasting to the screen porch on which I sit from a physical device wired into a room inside the house, and that device had to be written off as storm damage. I was able to read Book Funnel books and view some low-bandwidth, non-interactive web sites, but nothing interactive or audiovisual. No Blogspot. No e-mail. No comments on other people's blogs, if the blog pages opened at all.
I typed the reviews of the Book Funnel books into a Net-free computer, and am now recopying them into Blogspot and posting them every few hours until they're all up.
Title: Quality Service
Author: Beth Dolgner
Date: 2022
Publisher: Redglare
Quote: "What you need is a new husband, so you won't have to hire another assistant."
Emily's not ready to start dating again. She still has a cozy little bed'n'breakfast place whose main attraction is being located near a cemetery and haunted by friendly ghosts. In this short story, Emily identifies a particularly helpful new ghost and finds out who she was.
As regular readers know, I belong to the faith tradition that teaches that "the dead know not any thing" about the living, but that the vivid memories we have in which our dear departed seem to be reminding us of the things they really did and said are a good thing. I believe that memories of my husband guided me in disposing of his personal paraphernalia, but that that will be good, no doubt amusing, news to him if I remember to tell him about it in Heaven some day. So I don't believe there's any reality in stories like this one. Then again, I seem to have a very weak or missing neurological network for perceiving what people who perceive them call "spectral" things. So who knows.
Whatever you believe, this is a nice, short, cozy, well written story intended to sell you on a series of longer novels in which ghosts will tell more complicated tales and Emily will undoubtedly find a new husband. Emily is too young and cute to stay a widow for long.
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