By Kate Racculia

This book deserves a better reader than I am right now. I absolutely loved Racculia’s previous novel Bellweather Rhapsody and tore through it in a few days. I loved Tuesday Mooney, too, but it took me two weeks to read because my attention span is a fruitfly at this point.

It starts a little slow with introductions of all the characters, and Racculia really excels at characters – they were all interesting, distinct, and sympathetic but also clearly flawed in their own ways that kept them from being too likeable. Five of our central protagonists are at a Boston hospital fundraiser – the titular Tuesday Mooney being a researcher for the donor relations department– when an older gentleman keels over while bidding $50k for a meet-and-greet with New Kids on the Block. (I feel like this level of detail is characteristic of Racculia, and the book continues to be a love letter to all things Boston, as well as the adventure, murder, romance, ghost story it is.)

Even though he dies in the first chapter, I count the older gentleman as one of the protagonists, because it is his post-mortem scavenger hunt that leads the rest of the story, and his own (interesting, distinct) personality is threaded through it all as well. Through the scavenger hunt, the cast of characters expands to family and friends of the deceased as well as more random hunters, and we get lovely peaks into many of their lives. It was here that I would happily sit down for an hour or so to read and feel satisfied with the story, but then turn blank-eyed to the TV afterwards, which is very much a criticism of my own coping skills and not the novel itself.

However, when the villain is revealed to both the protagonists and the reader, that’s when I really got hooked, and stayed up far too late a couple of nights. In retrospect, I realize that I like a story to have more darkness to it than the first half had, focusing on the riddle and puzzle solving. It is quite a race to the end, and in retrospect has a well-crafted pace that exponentially speeds up over the course of the book. The finale is incredibly satisfying, tying up more loose ends than I’d even quite realized Racculia had threaded (though not all of them, keeping it a bit realistic), and I plan to read this again when I’m no longer quite so hollow eyed and empty headed.