Lost in the Light by Mary Castillo

Book Blurb:

One October morning in 1932, Vicente Sorolla entered the white house on the hill and was never seen again .

Now, Detective Dori Orihuela helplessly witnesses his brutal murder in her nightmares.

Settling into a 120 year-old Edwardian mansion, Dori restores her dream home while recovering from a bullet wound and waiting to go back on duty.

But then one afternoon, Vicente materializes out of her butler's pantry and asks her to find a woman named Anna. Dori wonders if she's not only about to lose her badge, but also her sanity.

Dori and Vicente's unlikely friendship takes us back to the waning days of Prohibition in San Diego and the dusty barrio of National City. Mary Castillo's new novel, featuring the wild Orihuela family that first delighted readers in Names I Call My Sister, weaves romance, history and a mystery into a humorous, touching and unforgettable story.

My thoughts:
Lost In the Light is a simple, heart warming, book filled with history, determination and follow through. It’s a parallel love story of 2 couples that centers around an aging haunted mansion.

The Author places this book in the paranormal, crime, mystery, suspense genre. I will agree that it fits the history portion very well, I guess because there’s a ghost the paranormal also fits , and a murder, that supports the crime portion, but I did not find the mystery, suspense or the amount of it I was expecting.

I found that the writing was simple, descriptions, scenery, and events just enough to satisfy the plot of the story. The characters interacted well with each other but in many ways I didn’t feel the connections. Dori and Gavin had a history but it was only briefly discussed, Dori and her family had deeper ties, but I attribute this to the Hispanic matriarchal traditions. The story line of Anna and Vicente was some of the better writing, showing the history, strife, hardships of the times, and compromises that had to be made during the 1930’s for immigrants.

The story is told by jumping back and forth between the current to the 1930’s as Dori remodels her home and seeks to find out what happened to Anna, at the request of her mansions ghost. The one big negative for me were character names, such as Dori, Grammy, Grampy & Megs, I had a hard time relating this to an adult book, as they made me feel I was reading for a much younger age group.

This book would be appropriate for readers 15 and up as there is minimal violence, nothing offensive and only a vague reference to any serious sex. The book has a happy ending, providing a conclusion to the story of Anna & Vicente, one that ties generations together, and a promise of a future for Dori & Gavin.

This book was provided to me by the Author through the Goodreads “Read to Review” program for an honest review

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Very engaging & interesting read that I got for free through the Read2Review section of the Paranormal & Horror Lovers group. Fantastic idea & a great way to meet new authors. I'm glad I met this one.

While this is a ghost story, it's a mystery & has a true horror element to it, but most of that is what humans can do to each other, nothing supernatural about it & it's all the more horrible for that. The mystery is interesting, solved partially by flashbacks into the days of the Great Depression & Prohibition. There's also a strong romantic element running through the story - no explicit sex.

On the downside, I found the narrative a bit choppy at times & the motivations of characters didn't always ring quite true, but the latter could be me. I felt it was a bit a stretch to give this a full 4 stars, but 3 stars weren't really enough.

I'll definitely look at some of this author's other books. ( )

I give this 3.75 stars

This is an intriguing ghost story and I couldn't stop reading until I reached the end. The love story at the heart of the book is big...in a classic Fitzgerald way.

Huge kudos to the author for highlighting Chicano history and experiences in California during the Prohibition...not something you usually come across.

I also appreciated having a cast of well-rounded characters of color. Again, diversity is sometimes hard to come across in genre fiction.

However, I took points off for some editing issues. The story read choppy in places instead of flowing smooth.

Also, took some points off because the heroine's relationship issues with Gavin was unnecessarily dragged on and on when it could have been solved with a simple conversation between two adults.

Overall, I enjoyed the read. ( )