Book Review – Ghost Slayer

Book: Ghost Slayer (Ghost Slayer 1) by Majanka Verstraete
Release Date: April 24th 2018
Tags: New Adult / Paranormal / Ghost / Possession
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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Goodreads

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Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this review copy in exchange for an honest review.

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Synopsis

Twenty-one-year-old Kaelyn has spent half her life hunting ghosts and killing them. But she’s not like the other ghost hunters who have to rely on spells and curses to banish ghosts back to where they came from, hoping that they don’t come back. When Kaelyn kills a ghost, they stay dead.

But in Mortimer Hall, a behemoth of a house, Kaelyn is about to face the most powerful and life-threatening ghost she ever met, and what she doesn’t know is that the ghost has been waiting just for her…

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Review

With a title like this, it was bound to grab my attention. I am all in for some epic ghost slaying. And for the most part I did get some epic ghost slaying. What I missed was the depth. In a few different kind of places.

While the whole premise of The Ghost Slayer caught my attention, that is where it stayed. It had my attention but didn’t truly engage me. It couldn’t make me move emotionally. When the book initially started I thought that maybe this was a world where ghosts was something everyone knew about. That would have been great. But as we moved through a few chapters it became clear this was not the case. It was just our world, but with ghost slayers and mediums. And other things. All very interesting but very little world building was done. These terms were thrown around but very little was explained. Demons were just tossed into the conversation as if I was suppose to know their place in this world. I needed more explanation, more thought into how everything fitted into this world.

The same thing was the case for the background of our characters. I missed a whole lot here and there. How did Kaelyn really roll into the ghost slaying and so on. How did she meet Alex. Because even the end gave nothing about that away while it did delve into that background. Just not enough.

And also I missed depth in the relationships. Just because you write the word friends to describe two characters relationship doesn’t mean it will come across that on the page. And the same goes for the romance. That whole ending romance wise just fell so very flat for me as I could not feel an inch of chemistry between these two characters.

And it is a shame because I think the idea, the world and the characters could have been great had the execution been better. There is potential here for sure. The idea of ghost slayers and their powers for instance is certainly something interesting, but also the hints about her father and her mother could create a great deepening of background and story. Kaelyn and Alex also have great potential for good characters if only they would get more deepening.

The author’s writing style in itself flows incredibly well and I did fly through this book in one sitting. Because of the good things I see I am interested in reading on with this series.