Happy Medium by Sarah Adler

A clever con woman must convince a skeptical, sexy farmer of his property's resident real-life ghost if she's to save them all from a fate worse than death, in this delightful new novel from the author of Mrs. Nash's Ashes .
 

Fake spirit medium Gretchen Acorn is happy to help when her best ( wealthiest) client hires her to investigate the unexplained phenomena preventing the sale of her bridge partner’s struggling goat farm. Gretchen may be a fraud, but she'd like to think she’s a beneficent one. So if "cleansing" the property will help a nice old man finally retire and put some much-needed cash in her pockets at the same time, who's she to say no?
 

Of course, it turns out said bridge partner isn't the kindly AARP member Gretchen imagined—Charlie Waybill is young, hot as hell, and extremely unconvinced that Gretchen can communicate with the dead. (Which, fair.) Except, to her surprise, Gretchen finds herself face-to-face with the very real, very chatty ghost that’s been wreaking havoc during every open house. And he wants her to help ensure Charlie avoids the same family curse that's had Everett haunting Gilded Creek since the 1920s.
 

Now, Gretchen has one month to convince Charlie he can’t sell the property. Unfortunately, hard work and honesty seem to be the way to win over the stubborn farmer—not exactly Gretchen's strengths. But trust isn’t the only thing growing between them, and the risk of losing Charlie to the spirit realm looms over Gretchen almost as annoyingly as Everett himself. To save the goat farm, its friendly phantom, and the man she's beginning to love, Gretchen will need to pull off the greatest con of her being fully, genuinely herself.

Cute, cozy, hints of the supernatural, and a habitual schemer, Happy Medium had a genius premise and all the elements of an amazing romantic dramedy. I had previously read Mrs. Nash’s Ashes so I had an idea of what I was getting into, and I had hoped that Sarah Adler’s sophomore novel would be able to improve on Nash’s disappointing and contrived climax/conclusion. Despite being paced more evenly and feeling more refined page to page, overall I found Happy Medium to suffer from similar issues of dumb character logic (2nd half only), melodrama that doesn’t have sufficient build-up (again 2nd half only), and a concluding plot twist that ruins most of its intriguing plot potential.

On the plus side, I quite enjoyed FMC Gretchen’s spiky personality and devious wit. Constantly trying to plan out her moves, both to convince Charlie that his farm is haunted and to safeguard her investment with her spirit medium client, I thought the first half of the book worked quite well; albeit feeling a bit slow for my taste. Although her sparring and enemies to friends to lovers arc with Charlie was good, her enemies to friends banter with the ghost Everett was the real highlight for me. Everett really steals the show and his plot threads involving his situation on the farm and his relationship to its owners was interesting to read. I would go as far to say my star rating would’ve been lower had Everett not been so silly and fun to read about.

Despite this book being classified as a contemporary romance novel, Everett’s light supernatural elements were more involved than I was expecting and were quite compelling! The curse involving the Waybill family, while comical at first, actually had a lot of promise. Assuming Gretchen was able to convince Charlie not to sell the farm, Everett’s future and potential end (or lack of end) could’ve gone in so many interesting directions. And then in the last one fourth of the book, everything falls apart with a poorly chosen plot twist and previously omitted detail to his curse.

Mrs. Nash’s Ashes caught me off-guard with how fast things spiraled towards its end but at least I could tell what Alder was trying to do. My Happy Medium’s plot twist however, mildly offended me by how insulting it was to the reader. The drama and implications of the curse, Everett’s eternal haunting, the potential sacrifice Gretchen potentially made (questionable character logic aside that can be attributed to her internal doubts and demons), I didn’t know how the book was going to resolve such a great setup. I don’t know what I was expecting but it was certainly anything but what the book gave me. It’s a happily ever after, everything works out kind of resolution that feels so cheap, lazy, and a complete copout. The book said something about it being a got’cha moment, and I fully felt that got’cha reaction in all the wrong ways.

Besides the unfortunate ending note, Happy Medium was otherwise quite pleasant and steady. Gretchen and Charlie’s relationship progresses very slowly, as well as her plotting ways to prevent the farm from being sold. As the story changes from how to stop the sale to how to save the farm, Gretchen’s brainstorming of business ideas was great. I also really liked the parts where Gretchen was able to use her effective (albeit often misused) skills of social engineering and intuitiveness to improve the farm’s business. Having worked directly with the food and agriculture industry at my day job, these business strategies were clever and real ideas that could work in practice. The humor was neither unhinged enough to make me laugh nor was it clever enough to entertain me, but it was decently written and executed. There were some great themes included such as seeing others as friends vs acquaintances, avoidance tactics encouraged by past abandonment, and the morality of lying for others’ benefit. A lot of these themes were introduced and initially handled well at first, only for Happy Medium then lack the finesse to pull them off. And that sentiment is almost verbatim what I also wrote in Nash’s review. Speaking of Mrs. Nash’s Ashes, Hollis Hollenbeck has a very small cameo in Happy Medium if you read it before this one (it’s a very small Easter egg reference however that’s almost not worth mentioning).

Despite the unfortunate narrative choices made in the back half of the book, Happy Medium is indeed quite a happy and cozy read. Even at their worst, Gretchen and Charlie are charming enough to read about and Everett’s presence more than makes up for whenever the main plot’s interest starts to dip. It’s just a shame that Sarah Adler again cooked up a stellar premise that she couldn’t pull off yet again. While not quite as disappointing as Mrs. Nash’s Ashes questionable ending, there’s definitely a lot of other novels with a similar tone that I’d likely recommend over this one. Unless you have a thing for Goat Farms that is, and this is coming from a reader that actually does regulatory work with Goat Dairy Farms.