Blog Tour, Excerpt & Review – A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer by Maxie Dara

Out now! The perfect way to kick off the fall season and get a start on your October TBR.

Thanks to Berkley Publishing for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review

A GRIM REAPER’S GUIDE TO CATCHING A KILLER – Maxie Dara (Released October 1st, 2024)

Make sure to scroll all the way down for an excerpt from the book!

My Quick Thoughts: 4/5 stars – This was a fun start to a new series! Modern-day grim reapers in an office like setting at SCYTHE – Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences – and I’m so ready to see how the series continues. Here we have Kathy, and she’s tasked with tracking down the missing soul of her newest client. He’s adamant that someone at S.C.Y.T.H.E has murdered him and wants Kathy to help him track down his killer. He refuses to move on until they catch the killer. The stakes are high because if she can’t get his soul to move on, then he’ll be doomed to roam earth as a ghost for eternity. 

I think the cover sets the tone for the story. Not too dark and looks like there’s going to be some good wit and humor. It was a perfect balance and a great addition to the Halloween TBR if you don’t want super dark horror.

Book Description:

Murder is (literally) not her department, but this grim reaper has to solve one–fast–or her new client won’t be able to move on.

Kathy Valence is forty-two, mid-divorce, and pregnant with her ex’s baby. She’s also a modern-day grim reaper employed by S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences), but frankly that’s the easiest part of her life right now. Or at least it was, until her latest client’s soul goes missing.

When she finally tracks down seventeen-year-old Conner Ortiz, he angrily denies he died of natural causes, despite what his file says. He insists that someone at S.C.Y.T.H.E. murdered him, and he demands Kathy find out who and why. 

Kathy has only forty-five days to figure out what happened to Conner and help him move on before the boy’s soul is doomed to roam the Earth as a ghost forever. She’s forced to rely on the help of her retired mentor, her almost ex-husband—and some sneaky moves by Conner himself. This is the wildest case of her career. . .and one wrong move could cost Kathy her job, not to mention her life.

About the Author:

Maxie Dara is a writer and actor from Ontario, Canada. She has been a freelance journalist focusing on the local arts and culture scene for more than five years, with bylines in publications such as Hamilton Magazine and Beyond James, among others. She is also a two-time award-winning playwright, taking home the Best of Fringe award at the 2017 Hamilton Fringe Festival for the musical comedy This Is Not a Musical: The Musical! and the 2020 Torpedo Prize for her play Alone Together, a pandemic drama. Maxie knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven, when she first fell in love with the written word. She also wanted to be a mermaid but has mostly focused on the writing side of things.

438 Melrose Court

I tapped the address in my file with the lid of the pen I’d been chewing on. Beside
the front door of the sandy beige new build, swirly metal numerals confirmed my
location. Four three eight. Weird. Definitely the right number, but this was all
wrong. I turned from the house and glanced down the manicured lawn to the street
sign across the road. It promised in no uncertain terms that this was Melrose Court,
just as it was supposed to be. I shut my file with a defeated sigh and went back in
through the open door a second time.

“Hello?” I called yet again as I stomped through the kitchen. It was a kitchen that
belonged on a show about kitchens more than in somebody’s house: clean and
white and open-concept, leading out into the high-ceilinged living room beyond.
The “after” on a home renovation show. Not even a spoon in the sink or a crumb on
the countertops. Which made the body sprawled across the tiled floor look even
more out of place.

Now, slap a corpse on the floor of my dingy apartment kitchen and you wouldn’t bat
an eye, at least in my line of work. But in a place like this, a dead body really spoils
the ambience.

I rounded the island and reopened my file.

Case # 507032

Conner Mateo Ortiz

Age: 17

Cause of death: Seizure

Time to Collect: 4:30 p.m.

“Conner?” My voice ricocheted off the stainless steel and marble surrounding me. I
crouched by the body and attempted to hover in a squat, but my left knee
protested my weight with a defiant pop, and I wobbled forward. “Nope, nope,
nope,” I muttered to myself, “no falling on bodies today. Not after last time.” I
lowered myself to my steadily widening bum by 507032’s head. His rich brown
locks fell over one closed eye, a spattering of freckles on his nose. I sighed, one
hand at my stomach. Poor kid. He looked younger than his age lying there, long
lashes pressed above bronze cheeks still full with the last remnants of baby fat. I’d
found his basement bedroom not ten minutes earlier; a gallery of posters and mess
and potential. It always felt wrong when they were young. Like their bodies should
still have some life left in them. But of course, they didn’t. That’s why I was there.

Still, he was going to make me late, and the last man to make me late was the very
reason I needed to get back to the office and then on my way home on time.

“Conner?” I tried again. Nothing. The house shuddered at my voice and fell still.

My phone vibrated in my back trouser pocket and I nearly puked, though I wasn’t
entirely sure the two were related. I scrambled for the phone and hauled myself to
my feet.

Simon. He got the table for six thirty instead of seven. Of course he did. Shit. If we
weren’t already in the middle of a divorce, I’d consider filing over this.

This wasn’t the way it normally worked-the way it always worked. Death, for all its
unpredictability and unknowns, was remarkably routine on my end. It was one of
the things I loved most about my job. Someone under my department’s jurisdiction
dies, I get the paperwork, carry out the collection, write up a report for Stu, and
am on the couch watching Family Feud with a bowl of canned tomato soup by five
thirty. That’s how it was, how it always had been for the six years I’d been a
Collections Agent with S.C.Y.T.H.E. But somehow today was different. Case 507032
was different.

I glanced back over the boy. My client files were always pared down to need-to-
know information, and in my position, there isn’t much I need to know. But it
seemed clear enough from the body-long-limbed and dressed in faded jeans and a
gray hoodie-that aside from his family’s apparent wealth, 507032 was your
average, unremarkable teenaged boy. So the question was, why wasn’t he here?

I did a second tour through the house, Conner Ortiz’s name bouncing back to me in
my own voice from the high ceilings of every starkly furnished room. By the time
I’d circled back into the kitchen, it was after five.

“Conner,” I said into the definitively empty house, “I’m sorry.”

I closed my file for the last time and left 438 Melrose Court.

Excerpted from A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer by Maxie Dara Copyright ©
2024 by Maxie Dara. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.