Killing in C Sharp--African American Woman Solves Mysteries in Ireland

I received Killing in C Sharp by Alexia Gordon from Net Galley, but read it recently because it's going to be discussed next week at the F2F mystery book club that I attend.   It's the third in a paranormal mystery series whose protagonist, Gethsemane Brown, is a school musical director in a small Irish village.  Like author Alexia Gordon, Gethsemane is African American.  The first book in the series, Murder in G Major reveals how Gethsemane ended up in Ireland.   If you feel that it's important to know the central character's background, by all means read Murder in G Major before this book. Yet I should point out that Gethsemane's U.S. background plays no role in Killing in C Sharp. So it's definitely possible to read this book first. I read Murder in G Major before there were any other books in the series and enjoyed it for the most part.  This inclined me to read another book in the series.

                     

Gethsemane rents a cottage that is haunted by a ghost.  So the owner of the cottage decided to pay a ghost hunting TV series to film an episode at his cottage.  Since I tend to suspect TV ghost hunters of faking the phenomena that they are supposedly investigating, I almost didn't read this book.  I expected it to deal with frauds discovering that there actually was a ghost which is mildly amusing, but I felt that I had better things to do with my reading time.   I turned out to be wrong about the TV ghost hunters.  There was also content that was a great deal more interesting to me.

Gethsemane invited an Irish composer, Aed Devlin, to give a series of lectures to her students.  Devlin was also premiering a new opera which was based on a Hungarian legend associated with a curse.  I happen to be an opera fan, and the legend described in the book definitely caused this feminist to sit up and take notice. I researched the story and learned that it isn't an actual Hungarian legend.  Alexia Gordon created it probably from the bones of a folk tale called The Walled Up Wife .  It's a different yet equally awful story from a feminist perspective, but Gordon's addition of a curse and a ghost vastly improved the narrative.

The murder expected by mystery lovers happened, and the local Catholic priest was given an opportunity to contribute a very fine witticism which I just adored.  I'll leave my readers to discover it for themselves.

 I consider Killing in C Sharp better than its description and the mystery more intriguing than in the first novel in the series.  The resolution was inventive.  I can't wait to see what Alexia Gordon comes up with in her next Gethsemane Brown novel.