A NEW LEASE ON DEATH

The fatal shooting of a Boston warehouse worker is investigated by an improbable pair of amateur sleuths. Like, really, really improbable.

Even after he’s died, Cordelia Graves can still chat with Jake Macintyre, the neighbor across the hall from her fourth-floor walk-up, for the simple reason that she’s dead too, pronounced a death by suicide at 43 after she was found in her bathtub last Christmas full of painkillers and Jack Daniel’s. Their halting conversation is abruptly terminated when Jake announces, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” and vanishes, never to return. Now that Jake’s incapable of investigating his own murder, Cordelia takes it upon herself to look into it. Since she has limited ability to interact with the pre-dead, though, she needs an ally among the living. The natural candidate is Ruby Young, an unemployed 20-year-old who’s moved into Cordelia’s apartment and whose belief in ghosts is so much stronger than Jake’s that she detects Cordelia’s presence even before her roommate is prepared to reveal herself. Their initial communications are awkward, since, as Cordelia notes, “I couldn’t touch a keyboard, and she couldn’t read my handwriting,” and the physical contact that allows them to talk to each other drains Cordelia of her energy. Soon enough, however, Cordelia has paved the way for Ruby to take over Cordelia’s old job as the office manager at the software design firm TrendCelerate and start gathering evidence. The mystery is laughably slight, but the camaraderie between the two women is surprisingly strong, and every single joke about being dead or communicating with the dead lands with a pleasant ding.

Here’s hoping the two leads get a case worthy of their considerable talents next time.