I hate it when I read the blurb about a book and I think it’s going to be one thing, but then it turns out to be totally different, and totally dull.

According to the back cover, The Haunting of Josie is about a young woman spending a year in a secluded cabin, untangling the threads of a mystery that killed a man she loved. She’s unprepared for her sexy and dashing neighbor Marc Westbrook, and doesn’t really need the distraction of the tall, dark, and handsome man-next-door, but soon she’ll have no choice but to trust him.

So I go in to this thinking that Josie’s got some terrible secret or bad guy that’s haunting her, that she lost her first love, that Marc’s going to be in danger, that terrible truths are going to come out and Marc and Josie are going to have to rescue each other and live happily ever after together the end.

That’s not what happened. The novel opens with a cat. Correction: the novel opens with the cat’s point of view. Yeah. Okay, whatever, I can go along with that. But then there’s a ghost and a mysterious key that the cat keeps moving around, and an old murder mystery that I really didn’t care about at all, and Josie’s secret wasn’t all that salacious or dangerous, and the damn cat keeps showing up. But the haunting is really the weirdest part. It’s Marc’s great-great-great uncle or some such nonsense, a writer who committed suicide but was really murdered (I think – I can’t remember), but he looks just like Marc. And he likes to appear to Josie when she’s half dressed. It’s creepy and not in a chills up your spine cause it’s cold and dark outside way, but creepy in the way that the guy at the end of the bar might want to stare at you while you shower way.

And then the stupid cat shows back up and we close out with the cat’s point of view again.

The whole thing felt weird and disjointed, and frankly, pretty dated, which is surprising since I think it’s only about ten years old. Definitely not Hooper’s strongest effort.

Disclaimer: this was an audio book, but I don’t think it would be any better in print.

More reviews found here.