Sheltering Spirits

by Lori Allison

With her dog grooming and boarding business finally taking off and her home renovations underway, Mallory finally has everything she has always dreamed of. However, when a freak accident with an old friend unleashes a new talent, Mallory begins to look at life in a new way. And death, especially after finding a dead body on her property. As her business suffers the consequences, she wonders which will come first: the poor house, prison, or the mental ward.

This story took a long time to get started. The early chapters have a lot of background information to the point of being extraneous. The information doesn't seem relative to the story and made me wonder what the plot even was. I would have liked to have seen some of the information later, maybe told in dialogue to someone or showing how this information related to the overall story. I almost felt as if Mallory's backstory would have been better served as a prequel novella instead of being in these earlier chapters.

According to my Kindle progress meter, the mystery occurred about 1/3 of the way into the book. Until then, I wasn't really sure what the story was really about, other than introducing the reader to the main character.

Conversely, while the beginning held too much information, the ending didn't seem to have enough. It felt a little rushed and I would have liked to have been given more details.

This story also had many grammatical errors, although they were easy enough to overlook because I enjoyed the story so much. Overall, I would rate this story four quills and place it on my middle shelf.

Ashleigh's Bookshelf