Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure: An innocuous mystery with a ghost from that universe Ghostwriter came from

You know sometimes...sometimes life is just hard and you need a book where nothing really bad can happen. Which is what the Aunt Dimity series is. Oh, there're issues, like how will the village populace get the glass display case from the bossy pub proprietress for their museum, and what if Sally who runs the tea room gets upset about the main character liking someone else's pastries more, but real problems? Nah.

Jumping in on the 21st book in a series is rather nice, because it discusses events that no doubt took entire books to unfold, but now that they're done with they're referred to glancingly, you say "oh how nice" and move onto the current mystery. Which is about a bracelet.

Since reading Murder By Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance With the Macabre i've felt more and more guilty about murder mysteries. It essentially says we read them for fun (true), that they trivialize death (also true), and make it just one part of a logic puzzle (true a third time). I tend to think of non-murder-mysteries as boring, but the incredibly perfect life Lori Shepherd leads is fun escapism of a different kind.

The entire series revolves around Lori, her family life, and the ghost of her dead mother's best friend who lives in a journal and communicates by writing in it. Yes. 

This particular book involves a bracelet found by Lori in the attic, which when she mentions it to the ghost of Aunt Dimity (by talking to the journal, obvs), Aunt Dimity gets VERY FLUSTERED FOR A GHOST and needs some time to calm down. She later explains to Lori the history of the bracelet in her former lifetime, and makes a request of Lori that I would have 100% said no to, but apparently Lori just loves people more than I do.

You can read these in a day. They're fun, they're a bit silly, it's English country life at its MOST innocuous, which has its own charm (ex: Vicar of Dibley). There was a lovely bit about a WWI soldier, and it made me feel like I learned more about London (and also made me google 'cream buns' and now I want one).

Ghosts! Bloomsbury! Aforementioned cream buns! Check it out if you want your brain to chill for a bit.