Spirit and Dust by Rosemary Clement-Moore (review)

The Goodnight family has been using their supernatural abilities to assist law enforcement for generations now, with seventeen-year-old Daisy their latest psychic sleuth to team up with the FBI. When the daughter of a notorious crime boss goes missing, Daisy flies from sunny San Antonio to the chilly streets of Minneapolis to see if her discussions with the dead will help the feds; instead she finds herself kidnapped and subsequently on the run with Carson, the lead (and stunningly good-looking) henchman of said crime boss. As Daisy follows the trail on a forced road trip through the Midwest, she finds herself ensnared in a supernatural catastrophe involving Egyptian mythology, ancient artifacts, and a power-hungry ghost. Despite having spent much of her life conversing with the dead, Daisy is charmingly optimistic (and certainly a relative in spirit to Maggie Quinn of Clement-Moore's Prom Dates from Hell, BCCB 7/07), facing down the spirits of overprotective grandmothers, murdered bodyguards, and ancient Egyptian queens with unblinkingly cheerful wit. Carson, as her foil, is then appropriately moody and stoic, and the push and pull between them is the stuff rom-com dreams are made of. There's a campy playfulness to the whole endeavor, and even the villain is a bit of a laugh, a tweed-wearing professorial type turned Egyptian god bent on overtaking the world with, what else, mummies. You can't really beat a story that has hijinks, romance, and a culminating scene in which the heroine defeats the bad guys by animating the bones of Sue the T-rex, can you?