Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door by Lucy Score
A nice, normal life. Is that too much to ask? For Riley Thorn it is. Divorced. Broke. Living with a pack of elderly roommates. And those hallucinations she’s diligently ignoring? Her tarot card-dealing mom is convinced they’re clairvoyant visions.
Just when things can’t get worse, a so-hot-it-should-be-illegal private investigator shows up on her doorstep looking for a neighbor…who turns up murdered.
Nick Santiago doesn’t play well with others. Unless the “others” are of the female persuasion. Wink. He’s a rebel, a black sheep, a man who prefers a buffet of options to being stuck with the same entrée every night, if you catch his drift.
When the pretty, possibly psychic Riley lands at the top of the list of suspects, Nick volunteers to find out whodunit. Only because he likes solving mysteries not because he wants to flex his heroic muscles for the damsel in distress.
All they have to do is figure out who pulled the trigger, keep the by-the-book detective with a grudge at bay, and deal with a stranger claiming he was sent to help Riley hone her psychic gifts. All before the killer discovers she’s a loose end that requires snipping.
This book was quirky, funny, and entertaining. There were times when I was literally laughing out loud. The humor was well written and didn’t take away from a detailed and exciting plot. Also, the character diversity in this book was incredible! A+, this is how you write realistically stories.
Riley’s life is sort of a mess. On top of all of that, she is basically an unclaimed psychic. She has visions, hears voices, and is able to communicate with the dead. One day, she has a vision of her next door neighbor being murdered. Trying to do her neighborly duty, she warns both the cops and him, but that doesn’t stop him from being murdered, it just makes her a suspect. This leads to a whole adventure with Nick, the PI hired to look into the murder.
The book is told from a dual perspective. I enjoyed reading Riley’s inner dialogue and the situations she stumbles upon and her reactions make it 10x better. I didn’t like the insta-lust aspect, but I do think Score was able to write the character growth and development, both individually and together, really well.
My main complaint about the book is that it was a bit to long. It was 520 pages and at about 75% of the book, I was like dang, I just want to know what happens, but there’s still a lot of pages left haha. That all being said, it didn’t feel repetitive or even like it was adding unnecessary information in order to fluff up the pages. Everything that happened, happened for a reason, so I am not even sure how it would be shortened.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was comedic and suspenseful. I am definitley going to look more into Lucy Score books, so if you have any recommendations, let me know. Thanks for reading. This book is available on Kindle Unlimited.
The Travelling Reader 
One thought on “Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door by Lucy Score”