View source for Ghosted: The Treason House Trilogy by Baye Hartshorne

{{infobox1
|title=Ghosted: The Treason House Trilogy
|author=Baye Hartshorne
|reviewer=Jill Murphy
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=An enjoyable and satisfying paranormal romance that takes a while to get going but repays the effort.
|rating=4
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=255
|publisher=Boonville Press
|date=December 2019
|isbn=B0829CP5BM
|website=https://www.romance.io/authors/5e11afdb01dbc864fba95cec/baye-hartshorne
|cover=B0829CP5BM
|aznuk=B0829CP5BM
|aznus=B0829CP5BM
}}

Julia Crawley has lost her job on ''Celebrity'' magazine and so she decides to cut her losses and return home to the village of Monmouth Cove on the Jersey Shore, hoping to return to her harder-hitting journalistic roots via local news. She'll be staying with her grandmother - a woman always ready to help younger relatives in need of a hand. There's only one problem with that: creepy Uncle Dex, who doesn't always keep his hands to himself.

Treason House is Monmouth Cove's most notorious building and supposedly haunted by the ghost of Medford, a man hung for treason by the British during the Revolutionary War. Julia feels drawn by Treason House and we soon find out why. She is not only a magnet for ghosts but she can see them, too. And so when Knight, the ghost of a gallant Victorian gentleman appears and the spark between mortal and spirit is unmistakable, what is Julia to do? Can a relationship with a ghost ever work? 

Not if the seventeenth-century pirate also haunting Treason House has anything to do with it. 

I enjoyed this paranormal romance. Julia and Knight make for a sweet couple and you want to get behind them straightaway - especially given Julia's awful Uncle Dex and oblivious grandmother, together with the rest of her rather dysfunctional family. Knight is suitably chivalrous and gallant and Julia quite determined. They complement each other well and incited goodwill in me right from the start. 

The book also contains quite a deal of interesting historical information - about the Revolutionary War, about diseases that killed children before modern medicine, about the role of women in days long gone. And Treason House also has a fabulous range of ghosts with different characters and abilities that help the story along. Carillon, the pirate, is a well-drawn anti-hero: starting off as little more than a bullish irritant but becoming more aggressive and threatening as the story progresses, adding tension. I won't give away the denouement- but I wasn't expecting it and that pleased me no end. 

It's not perfect. It takes a little while to get going so you will need to persevere - I think some of the scene-setting could be cut from the first chapter so that the reader comes into a bigger punch. Julia has an extensive extended family, all with various problems and issues, and I think the overall narrative could have been streamlined to keep the book focused. But these are nitpicks and if you enjoy a paranormal romance that is more romance than erotica, you'll enjoy ''Ghosted''. 
I look forward to the next book in the trilogy.

You might also enjoy [[The Winter's Child by Cassandra Parkin]], a modern Gothic tale of twisted love, secrets and hauntings. And if pure ghost stories are your thing, you could try [[The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales by Kate Mosse]].

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