After the disaster of the month before, Dahlia Poplar, cursed witch and helper extraordinaire, is ready for her serene, supernatural small town life to return to normal. However, her hopes for a more peaceful existence don’t last when a childhood friend moves back to Luna Lane to open up an escape room.
I was granted complimentary audio ARC access by author Amy McNulty via Audible promo code in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to Amy and her team! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Enchantments and Escape Rooms
Spooky Games Club Book Two
by Amy McNulty
Print/eBook
27 October 2020
Crimson Fox Publishing
Page Count: 302
Audiobook
Published 9 September 2021
Narrator: Danielle Daly
Length: 7 hours and 25 minutes
Genre: Paranormal Cozy Mystery
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After the disaster of the month before, Dahlia Poplar, cursed witch and helper extraordinaire, is ready for her serene, supernatural small town life to return to normal. However, her hopes for a more peaceful existence don’t last when a childhood friend moves back to Luna Lane to open up an escape room.
With the Spooky Games Club thriving, Dahlia decides to help her friend by using her magic to quickly get his business up and running. Dahlia’s enchantments accomplish the task, but before the Games Club has a chance to enjoy the new attraction, a test of the escape room results in a freak, fatal accident. Riddled with guilt, Dahlia wonders where her enchantments went wrong—or if there’s something more to the disaster.
The only way to divine whether or not the death was her fault, the result of an accident, or murder is to investigate—and perhaps even play the dangerous game herself. In this one-hour escape room, failure to escape could mean death, not just for Dahlia, but for those she holds most dear.
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My Review
My Rating: 5 Stars
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Peace seems to have fallen on this quaint little town of monsters and ghouls since the cursed boardgame mystery was solved, but life never stays easy in this place! An outsider is here to build an escape room that will draw tourists, and no sooner are the renovations complete when things start going horribly wrong and this poor little town once again has a body on its hands. Can Dahlia solve this mystery and save her friends?
If you love cozy mysteries and anything paranormal, you need to read this series! I was fortunate enough to be included on the review tour for the first installment, Broomsticks and Board Games, when it first got an audiobook, and I rated that one a 5 too. These mysteries are fun, just complex enough to keep you guessing, and wrap you up in the messed up personal lives of a very compelling cast of characters along the way. I want to keep coming back to this little town and the Spooky Games Club for along time yet!
There’s enough backstory and world-building details built into this book here and there that I don’t think reading these books in order is an absolute necessity. You might spoil the mystery of prior books if you read later ones first, but you’re not going to be lost jumping in late.
Both author Amy and narrator Danielle did an amazing job of making me vehemently hate early antagonist Fred, and I think that made it even more fun! I also love how regular life still goes on. Dahlia still has to perform her daily good deed or stuffy the consequences. Faen still has kids to look after. Draven still have a business to run, and still grumbles about his nocturnal nature meaning he’s the last to hear what happened. Broomhilda is still the most adorably catlike animate broom I’ve ever met. (Forgive me if I’ve misspelled names as I’ve only listened to the audio.)
In terms of the narrative performance, this is the same narrator returning as book one, and overall I do think Danielle Daly does a good job. She puts in maximum effort to vary every character’s voice in pitch, cadence, accent, etc. so it’s always easy to tell who’s talking, even if you’re terrible with remembering character names. My only negative comment is that some of the down-pitched voices sounded a little too forced and occasionally grated on me. I looked back at my review of the previous book and I didn’t mention it then, so I’m not sure now if there was less of that done in book one or if I just noticed it more in this one. I do listen fast, 2x these days, and that tends to pitch things up if it’s going to cause notable alterations, so it’s also possible that those voices are a bit lower at regular speed and it all sounded fine at 1x and I just found the wrong speed to play it back for those voices. Every time I started the audio again and it defaulted to 1x it felt far too slow for me, though, so I didn’t do enough 1x listening to tell.
Thanks again Amy McNulty for the review copy! I highly recommend this series to all cozy mystery lovers with an interest in paranormal fiction.
About the Author
Amy McNulty is an editor and author of books that run the gamut from YA speculative fiction to contemporary romance. A lifelong fiction fanatic, she fangirls over books, anime, manga, comics, movies, games, and TV shows from her home state of Wisconsin. When not editing her clients’ novels, she’s busy fulfilling her dream by crafting fantastical worlds of her own.
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About the Narrator
Danielle Daly hails from Long Island, New York but hopes you can’t tell that when she’s reading to you. Grateful for her many years of experience in narrating stories for various short story fiction podcasts, the opportunity to narrate audiobooks for a wider audience is a dream come true.
Check out my review of Book one, Broomsticks and Board Games!
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Great review! I’m glad to hear this whole series is getting audiobooks.