3-1/2 stars
Though a good read in the end, this one is a bit of a slog with a slow build/set up, but the characters are realistic and solid people. Unfortunately, I didn't find the main characters, Elliot and his companion ghost, John, compelling enough to keep my attention for long, which is why it took so long to read. I am, however, willing to read another Dorien Grey book in the future. ( )

I really wanted to love this book. Great premise: after an accident, Elliott wakes up in the hospital with no memory of how he got there. The doctors fill him in, but he quickly becomes aware of a presence in his hospital room. This presence/ghost follows him home.

Elliott's friendly ghost, John, has amnesia and does not know anything but his name. Elliott begins to try and unravel the mystery of John's identity and murder.

Most of the book is boring descriptions of the minutiae of Elliott's day: he makes coffee, he gets dressed, he reads a book, he takes a nap, he calls people. These descriptions take up paragraphs!

He has an obnoxious relationship with his sister (a thoroughly one-dimensional character) purely so that he has access to a police officer, here his brother-in-law.

The story of John's alias and his link to Elliott's new relationship strains credulity. I remember barking a laugh at that part.

A cool idea to have a mystery series starring Elliott the Contractor and his side-kick John the Ghost, but the first volume managed to make this boring so I will probably pass on subsequent volumes. ( )

When I started this book I wasn't expecting to find romance in it, since it was presented as an old classic sleuthing novel, and so you can imagine my surprise when the hero, Elliott, not only has a romance, he has THREE romance, two of them at the same time, and he is not even a slut ;-)

But I will try to start from the beginning. Elliott is a very wealth man without attitude, who chose to work not for necessity but for pleasure. He loves the olf fashioned buildings of Chicago (a thing Chicago is famous for and I can say since I wandered for the city centre searching for them when i was there) and he made a work of them: he buys a building at time, gives it new life to then selling it to trusted hands. And sometime he falls in love for a building so much that he doesn't have the heart to sell it, and so Elliott has a strange collection: where other people collect miniatures, he collects real building. If you find strange that I spend so much time talking of Elliott's hobby, it is since most of Elliott's passion is reserved to his love for those old buildings, on a personal level he is quite aloof, almost detached. Elliott is a real nice guy, he seems to have no problem to find a guy when he wants it, and all his past lovers are still in nice terms with him... also since Elliott is so good that he is never the one to dump, they dumped him, always pleading forgiveness... mmm, I believe that Elliott is real good to not become involved when he doesn't want it.

When the story starts, Elliott is in hospital recovering from an accident and he 'feels' that someone else is in the room. Elliott, practical guy he is, soon realizes that the presence is a ghost, and it doesn't take him much to link the ghost, whose first words were, My name is John, to the John Doe who was admitted in the ER at his same time, and who unfortunately died. The ghost is not actually your usual ghost, he is as I said, a presence, he talks in Elliott's mind when said mind is free from any other thought (means when Elliott is asleep), and makes clear his presence giving strange feelings to Elliott regarding objects and pictures. The ghost apparently is suffering from amnesia, and Elliott's quest to find who he is goes pace to pace with his ability to recall little pieces of his past life. So the main mystery, the core of the book, is to find out who was John, and the author is very good in letting the reader catches only little clues here and there. I pretty much soon suspected who John was, but I had an advantage that not many of you will have. Anyway I don't want to say more on it, since as I always say, you can't summarize a mystery without risking to give up the mystery itself.

Let us instead talk of Elliott's personal life, that is for me almost as interest as the mystery itself. At the beginning of the book, Elliott is in an on / off relationship with Rick; Rick is a nice guy, but sincerely I don't feel like Elliott was really involved; and so I was not surprise when Elliott manages to be dumped again... Rick also took the guilty on himself, and Elliott told him to not worry. I was not so disappointed that the first romance in the book ended in such a cold way, since I was already planning the romance between Elliott and John, the ghost. But no, even if I'm sure to have read something more between Elliott and John than a simple utilitarian bond aimed to discover John's identity, the author has someone else in mind for Elliott. Enter Steve, a young, hot and nice latin american guy who Elliott meets in a club and the same night takes to bed. The relationship between Elliott and Steve is more interesting than the one with Rick, but still I feel like Elliott is not entirely involved, I always feel as if he is taking back something. It's strange Elliott is quite a 'physical' man, he has sex both with Rick than with Steve (but not at the same time!), even if the author adopts the the 'behind closed door''s rule, the reader knows that Elliott is not shy or antisocial, but truth be told, I felt a real emotional involvement only with John, and John is not even corporeal!

In the end, maybe I'm wrong but for me the real couple here are Elliott and John; Steve is a really nice guy, even John tells so to Elliott, and the reader can't really resent him, since being John a ghost, and an incorporeal ghost, you can't pretend for Elliott to be a monk. And so here my idea that Elliott has two relationship at the same time, one with Steve involving his mind and body, and one with Elliott involving his heart; till the day mind, heart and body will devoted to the same man, Elliott for me remains an on the edge man, still waiting for something.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934841048/?tag=elimyrevandra-20