suffice to say that halfway through the novel, she began to get on my nerves. She is the teacher who knows how to handle unruly students, she is the detective who unearths all the clues, she is the one the handsome Irish men find so fascinating, she is the one with all the quips, she is the one to whom people unburden their woes, she is the champion softball pitcher, she is…. On the other hand, the author makes Gethesmane a little too much of a virtuoso. So this was a refreshing change from some texts that I have read where colour remains the predominant marker of the main character’s self.

Gethsemane is an accomplished young woman who knows how to get her way and except for a rude indirect reference by an unlikeable character and a few passages spoken by herself, I wouldn’t even have noticed her colour. Also I liked the fact that nowhere is a great deal made about the protagonist’s colour. I had no idea before starting the book that it involved a paranormal angle, so it was quite startling when the ghost made his appearance and I loved the snarky exchanges between our heroine and the ghost. Eamon however tells Gethsemane that he never did so and wants her to convince the current police-officer to reopen the case and clear his name because only then would he be able to have a ghostly reunion with his wife. Twenty-five years earlier, Eamon had been accused of killing his wife Orla (the one with the halo around her head) and then committing suicide. On the first day at the cottage that she is staying in (how she is allowed never became very clear except perhaps that Billy McCarthy who has inherited the cottage is a Good Samaritan), she is confronted by the ghost of world-famous Music Composer Eamon, uncle of Billy. Not willing to return back to her (high-achieving) family in the US and be termed a failure, Gethsemane (how does one pronounce it?) takes up the job of a music teacher at a village’s school in Ireland and now has mere six-weeks to prepare the school’s musical team for an all-important musical competition. To add to her woes, her luggage gets lost in transit. Gethsemane Brown, an accomplished violinist comes to Ireland to be part of an orchestra, only for the part to be snagged by the conductor’s mistress.

Murder in G Major by Alexia Gordon