Spotlight & Giveaway: A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Olivia Blacke to HJ!

Hi Olivia and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A New Lease on Death: A Mystery!

 
Hi! I’m Olivia Blacke, author of A New Lease On Death. I had my first ghost encounter when I was only five years old, but my first involvement with an active crime scene wasn’t until much later, when I accidentally stepped into a chalk outline on a Manhattan sidewalk. Armed with a Criminology and Criminal Justice degree, I finally found a way to channel my love of the supernatural and passion for writing into darkly humorous supernatural mysteries. I am also the author of the cozy Record Shop Mysteries and Brooklyn Murder Mysteries. I still want to be a unicorn when I grow up.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

A New Lease On Death, a supernatural mystery, follows a grumpy, recently deceased ghost and her new, annoyingly perky living roommate as they form an unlikely alliance and put aside their considerable differences to solve a series of seemingly unrelated murders in their Boston neighborhood. Death is only the beginning in this darkly funny supernatural mystery about an unlikely crime-solving duo. Available in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook October 29, 2024 from Minotaur.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“A tiny voice in the back of my head told me that it didn’t work that way. That it was impossible. The laws of physics and yadda yadda yadda. I told the tiny voice to shut the hell up.”

One of the reasons I like this quote so much is that we’re all trying to find our way and so often, people love to tell us what we can’t do. Sometimes we have to ignore them and do it anyway.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I’ve always wanted to tell a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view. What are ghosts afraid of? What do they want? How can they walk through walls but not fall through the floor? A New Lease on Death was my opportunity to explore all that, while having my characters solve a mystery.
• This book went through so many titles before we landed on A New Lease on Death. And by “so many titles,” I mean over a hundred. Literally. I kept a running list of them. Finding a title that conveyed humor without being too cozy, was dark without being too dark, and was snarky without being rude was an enormous challenge but I think we came up with the perfect title that reflects the tone of the book.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

A New Lease on Death is a mystery, and the main characters don’t have a romantic connection. However, Ruby and Cordelia have an unconventional relationship. They’re roommates, but Ruby’s alive and Cordelia isn’t. At the beginning of the story, they don’t get along at all because they’re so different, but it’s those differences that make them such good investigative partners and the end, this unlikely duo have become friends.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

In the first chapter, you’re introduced to Jake, a man who struggles to wrap his head around the facts that he’s dead and that he’s been murdered. His reactions and their immediate consequences are both dark and funny at the same time and I hope that it has readers laughing out loud, like it did me.

Readers should read this book….

…because it’s a ghost story that’s more sweet than spooky, and a murder mystery is more about the journey two unlikely detectives take to uncover the truth than about forensics and police procedure.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on the sequel to A New Lease on Death, where once again living Ruby and her ghost roommate, Cordelia, have to cooperate with each other to solve another murder that hits close to home. In doing so, they uncover more secrets about each other and the people around them. In addition to some familiar faces from A New Lease on Death, there are a few new characters guaranteed to spice up their lives.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One copy giveaway of A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke, US Winner ONLY

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Have you ever experienced something you couldn’t quite explain that left you wondering if maybe ghosts (or other paranormal activity) might really exist?

 
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Excerpt from A New Lease on Death: A Mystery:

From A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

CHAPTER THREE
RUBY

Ever since I could remember, I’ve wanted to believe in ghosts. And not just ghosts. All sorts of paranormal creatures my mom used to call claptrap. Sasquatch? Real. I mean, I’ve seen the videos! Chupacabra? Nessie? Champ? Skunk apes? Why not? UFOs? The government practically admitted they exist. But ghosts? That’s the dream.
The moment I first stepped foot in this apartment, I just knew it was haunted. There was this odd sensation in the place that’s hard to describe. The first time I flew in an airplane, I didn’t notice the change in air pressure because it built up gradually. Then I yawned and the pressure popped. That’s the closest I could come to explaining how the air inside the apartment felt. Not threatening. Not scary. Just off. Different. It pops.
Then there’s the fact that the rent was dirt cheap. It was a steal, even in this neighborhood. The apartment came fully furnished, and not with just a lumpy sofa and a saggy mattress left over from the last tenant. There were socks in the drawer, matched and folded, arranged in neat rows. Lush green plants covered every surface. Seriously, what kind of person moves out and leaves that many plants behind?
Of course, I googled this place before signing the lease. It wasn’t hard to find info about the recent tragedy. Cordelia Graves, the last resident, dead at forty-three of apparent suicide in her—soon to be my—Boston apartment. She’d OD’d on pain killers and booze in the bathtub. No family members were listed in the article I’d read. I guess there were worse ways to go, surrounded by all these pretty plants.
I tried my hardest to keep the plants alive. I did, but I only ever managed to make things worse. Too much water. Too little water. Too much light. Too little light. One by one, they went in the trash. All of them but one stubborn philodendron were gone now. If there really was a ghost in this apartment, she probably hated me.
I hadn’t told anyone that my apartment was haunted. People already thought I was a flake. Whatever. Personally, I preferred “eccentric” but apparently, I wasn’t old enough or rich enough to be called eccentric. For now, I was just weird. It’s okay for weird people to believe in ghosts, but if they tell people there’s a ghost living with them, then they’re not weird. They’re not eccentric. They’re crazy. And not the socks-on-hands, aren’t-they-fun-at-parties kind of crazy, but the seriously-we’re-worried-about-you-Ruby crazy.
It’s not like I had proof or anything. Sure, things weren’t always precisely where I remembered leaving them, but I’ve been called scatterbrained a time or three. Light bulbs randomly burned out—which honestly could just be that the cheapo landlord bought cheapo bulbs. I heard strange noises sometimes, but the walls were thin and my neighbors were loud.
The curtains opened by themselves when I wasn’t looking, like they’d done this morning, but I supposed there could be a logical explanation for that. Maybe there was a nearby underground train track, or when trucks passed by outside, it rattled the foundation and the heavy curtains slid open on their own. I mean, nothing in this building was square or level. It could happen.
But this was different. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t ignore that ugly green sweater and those itchy corduroy pants lying out on my bed. As if I’d ever wear that sweater. The only reason I even had that puke green sweater was because before I moved here, my ex, Jerky McJerkface, borrowed my car and when I got it back, that sweater, along with a skanky bra and a tube of lipstick, was wadded up under the passenger seat. Two years of being madly in love and thinking we had a future together, and this was all I had to show for it. I kept the sweater as a reminder of why my ex was, and always would be, my ex. I wouldn’t wear that sweater any more than I would wear her nasty lipstick.
Here it was, actual proof positive that I wasn’t alone in this apartment. It was about time that me and Cordelia Graves were formally introduced. And if I was wrong, and I was talking to thin air? Well, no one would ever know, now would they? “Where did these come from?” I asked, hoping for a response, any response.
When there was none, I shook my head. Was I imagining things? It wasn’t possible that I’d laid that sweater out by accident and then forgotten. Sure, I did things on autopilot sometimes—who didn’t?—but that wasn’t something I would do. Then again, a spontaneous four-hundred-mile move to a city I’d never even visited, without a job or a single friend, just so I could “start over” didn’t seem much like something I would do either, and I’d done exactly that.
I tossed the outfit in the dirty clothes hamper so I didn’t have to look at that sweater anymore, then I took a good hard look around my room. Nothing else was out of place. There were no unexplained shadows or strange movements out of the corner of my eye. But I knew down to the tattered soles of my favorite unicorn slippers that I wasn’t alone.
“Cordelia? Cordelia Graves?” My voice sounded high-pitched and squeaky like it always did when I got overexcited. Which, according to my mom, was pretty much all the time. But could you blame me? This was by far the single most coolest thing that had ever happened to me, and I’d once found a megalodon tooth on a Maryland beach. “Come on, I know you’re there. Show yourself.”

From A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Death is only the beginning in Olivia Blacke’s A New Lease on Death, a darkly funny supernatural mystery that introduces an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Ruby Young’s new Boston apartment comes with all the usual perks. Windows facing the brick wall of the next-door building. Heat that barely works. A malfunctioning buzzer. Noisy neighbors. A dead body on the sidewalk outside. And of course, a ghost.

Since Cordelia Graves died in her apartment a few months ago, she’s kept up her residency, despite being bored out of her (non-tangible) skull and frustrated by her new roommate. When her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake Macintyre, is shot and killed in an apparent mugging gone wrong outside their building, Cordelia is convinced there’s more to it and is determined to bring his killer to justice.

Unfortunately, Cordelia, being dead herself, can’t solve the mystery alone. She has to enlist the help of the obnoxiously perky, living tenant of her apartment. Ruby is twenty, annoying, and has never met a houseplant she couldn’t kill. But she also can do everything Cordelia can’t, from interviewing suspects to researching Jake on the library computers that go up in a puff of smoke if Cordelia gets too close. As the roommates form an unlikely friendship and get closer to the truth about Jake’s death, they also start to uncover other dangerous secrets.
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Meet the Author:

OLIVIA BLACKE (she/her) had her first encounter with a ghost when she was only five years old, but her first involvement with an active crime scene wasn’t until much later, when she accidentally stepped into a chalk outline on a Manhattan sidewalk. Armed with a Criminology and Criminal Justice degree, she finally found a way to channel her love of the supernatural and passion for writing into darkly humorous supernatural mysteries. She is also the author of the Record Shop Mysteries and the Brooklyn Murder Mysteries. She still wants to be a unicorn when she grows up.
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