While the traditional idea of a grim reaper doesn't bring the words "cozy" and "heartwarming" to mind, those are precisely the vibes Maxie Dara achieves with her debut novel. In A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer, Kathy Valence wears sensible clothes and eats in the lunchroom as part of her daily work routine--it's just that her employer is S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences), and her job is transporting souls of the recently departed to a processing facility so they can move on to whatever afterlife awaits them.
Kathy is pregnant, mid-divorce, and very attached to her routine. Because she believes that she ruins everything she touches, it's important to her that her work remains uninteresting and ordinary. But that goes out the window when a routine collection gets disrupted by the undeniable absence of the soul itself and her subsequent discovery that this isn't a routine collection at all: the soul in question, Conner Ortiz, claims to have been murdered by a S.C.Y.T.H.E. employee. With only 45 days before Connor is doomed to become a ghost that will be trapped on Earth forever, Kathy is forced to rely on her mentor, Jo, and her maybe-ex-husband, Simon, to figure out what went wrong and what's really going on within S.C.Y.T.H.E.
Brimming with tense hijinks and sparkling humor, Dara's novel is an endearing, fun read about what it looks like to challenge damaging mental narratives that can hold one back from building a life of happiness and accepting--and reciprocating--love. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer