Spotlight & Giveaway: Death at the Door 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, Death at the Door: A Ruby and Cordelia Mystery!

 
Hi! Thanks for having me on HJ. I’m Olivia Blacke, and I write mysteries. Why is a mystery writer on HJ you ask? Because there is a lot of crossovers between genres. What romance is complete without a little mystery or suspense? What mystery is complete without a romantic angle? The only difference is that in a mystery, the love interest is often a suspect in a murder!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Can Ruby and Cordelia navigate the fine line between the dead and the living to bring a killer to light? In Death at the Door, Cordelia (a ghost) and Ruby (her living roommate) return with an all-new supernatural mystery. This time, they must find a way to work together to solve a murder in the office. When death knocks, they answer. Coming from Minotaur October 21, 2025.
 

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

Ghosts are real! They exist! You exist! That’s the coolest thing ever, and no one will ever believe me.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

One of my favorite things about Death at the Door is experiencing the friendship blossoming between Ruby, a 20-year old, perky, living person and Cordelia, the middle aged, grumpy ghost haunting her apartment. One of the ways they communicate is by using magnetic poetry kits, so I went out and got a bunch of kits that I use to inspire their conversations.

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

In Death at the Door, when a handsome new man moves into their apartment building, the ghost of Cordelia is determined to set him up with her living roommate. Since Ruby’s too tongue-tied around him to make a move, Cordelia decides to orchestrate a meet cute to get the conversation started.

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

Cordelia is trying to keep a low profile but she doesn’t always succeed, like the time when she and Ruby were at the grocery store and ended up freaking out a fellow shopper:

When two jars of tomato sauce levitated off the shelf seemingly all by themselves, the unsuspecting shopper standing near my cart shrieked. Cordelia dropped the jars. Glass shattered. Tomato sauce splashed everywhere, transforming the aisle into a crimson crime scene that smelled of basil and garlic.
I could barely hold back my laughter as the other shopper, her face ashen and her breaths shallow, turned to me. “Did you . . . Did they . . . You saw that, right?”
“Saw what?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face.

Readers should read this book….

If you enjoy darkly funny mysteries with a supernatural twist, you’ll enjoy a snarky ghost, female friendship, and murder all coming together in Death at the Door.

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

Right now, I’m working on the next (as yet untitled) installment of the Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries, where the odd-couple of crime-solving return to tackle a murder that hits too close to home.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One copy of DEATH AT THE DOOR, US Winner only

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the form and Post a comment to this Q: As a relatively new ghost, Cordelia is still testing the limits to her ghostly abilities. If you had the power to defy the laws of physics, what kind of power would you want to have?

Excerpt from Death at the Door: A Ruby and Cordelia Mystery:

As Ruby diced up the cucumbers, I pulled the large wooden salad bowl off the high shelf I knew she couldn’t reach and sat it down on the counter.
“What’s next?” she asked.
“You really are helpless in the kitchen, aren’t you?” I opened the refrigerator.
Ghosts and electronics didn’t mix. Something about my presence fried their circuits, and caused a feedback loop that was excruciatingly unpleasant on my end. The fridge, however, was ancient and the motor was in the back. I could open the door without affecting the refrigerator much, not counting that poor light bulb. It hadn’t stood a chance. If Ruby ever upgraded to one of those fancy models with a video screen in the door, it wouldn’t last a day.
I carried the lettuce, carrots, and a vine with juicy red tomatoes on it to the cutting board, not caring that she could see the produce floating. It wasn’t as if I was keeping any secrets from her. Well, I was, but not the secret of my presence. I was hiding from other people—they couldn’t accept the truth of my existence—but not from Ruby.
“Go ahead and chop these up,” I instructed. Yes, I could have done it for her, but that wouldn’t have taught her anything useful. The girl needed to learn how to cook.
Her cuts were sloppy and uneven. Instead of thin slices, her tomatoes were a smushed mess. “What did those poor tomatoes ever do to you?” I asked her as seeds squirted out from beneath her knife.
Even though she took twice as long to chop the salad ingredients as it would have taken me, she was trying to grow up, and I was proud of her. Granted, sloppily diced carrots were just a start, but she’d also snuck a lovely little Monstera into the grocery cart while I wasn’t looking. She had a long way to make up for all my plants she’d killed when she first moved in, but this was a step in the right direction.
The timer went off, and Ruby hastily scraped all the salad ingredients off the cutting board into the bowl. She left the knife on the counter. I moved it to the sink as she opened the oven. “Smells amazing,” she said as the hot air curled around her.
I took a deep whiff. Nothing. “You can do this, Cordy,” I told myself.
The sheer amount of concentration I needed to do things that used to come so naturally to me was a pain. I could see in the dark. I had hearing like a bat. So why did I have to work so hard to smell anything? And then the scent hit me. Cheesy, garlicky goodness. I could almost taste the bubbling marinara. Almost.
I’d tried eating some of my favorite foods, but it wasn’t the same as when I’d been alive. I couldn’t taste anything, and the food went right through me. Literally.
Ruby pulled out the eggplant and the bread and set them on top of the stove to cool.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked her, but she was already walking away. “Come on Ruby, pay attention.” I opened the door to the oven and let it drop with a clang.
“Huh?” Ruby asked. She closed the oven door. I opened it again. “What am I missing? Ohh.” She reached over and turned off the oven. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Good girl,” I told her, closing the oven door.
Like the refrigerator, the oven was older than dirt. I could open and close the door all day, but if I got close enough to the circuits to turn it on or off or set the temperature, it could do anything from blowing a fuse to burning down the whole building. Plus, if the oven died, the landlord would probably replace it with an even older model from a vacant apartment or the basement storage, one that hadn’t been cleaned in years.
“Smells great. Am I forgetting anything else?”
I grinned. This was the part I was looking forward to. Sure, I wanted Ruby to learn how to cook. Everyone needed to know how to feed themselves. But I had an ulterior motive.
“Timing’s everything, Cordy,” I told myself as I opened the front door. There were only a few steps between the tiny kitchen and the common hall, so there was no way Ruby would fail to notice the door opening.
“We expecting company?” she asked, going to the door even as I slipped out and rapped on the door across the hall.
The door opened and Tosh stepped out.
Tosh was the newest resident of the building, having moved in earlier this week. The former tenant of his apartment had died under mysterious circumstances shortly after I had. And if it weren’t for me and Ruby, his death might have gone unsolved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

The odd couple of crime-solving returns in Olivia Blacke’s Death at the Door, where a ghost and her living roommate find another mystery on their doorstep.

Ruby Young is slowly adjusting to her new life in Boston. A big part of that is her unexpected roommate—the ghost of the woman who lived there before. For Cordelia Graves, she may no longer be breathing, but it’s still her apartment and Ruby is the somewhat unwanted houseguest. They’re both happy they’ve managed to become friends, which is a miracle considering they struggle to communicate with each other. Cordelia even set Ruby up with her old job.

When Ruby discovers the body of a delivery guy at work, the new life she’s been building hangs in the balance. The last time Cordelia dragged Ruby into a murder investigation, it was almost two ghosts living in the apartment, not one. Determined to protect Ruby, Cordelia tries to shield her from the investigation, but Ruby has other ideas. It will take both of them working together to navigate the fine line between the dead and the living to bring a killer to light.
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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 the darkly humorous Ruby and Cordelia 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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