A gift of a book and perfect for snuggling up with as the nights draw in. A clever plot made perfect by characters you want to meet for yourself. A treasure-hunt where the treasure is the discovery that love and friendship can be found in the most unlikely of places and in the strangest of ways.

I loved this book. It crept up on me, the way a good friendship does, and drew me gently along to a warm and happy close - despite certain sudden upsets along the way. Wry, well-observed and beautifully written.

I loved this book, which is packed with genuinely likeable characters and a mystery to solve. Tuesday Mooney is a bit of an enigma - at least to her gay best friend, Dex. She gives little away about herself, and tries to live apart from other people when she isn’t at work researching rich people who can make charitable donations to the hospital she works at. She loves all things gothic and horror. At a fundraising event, she meets Archie, a rich, possible-contributor to the hospital, and witnesses the death of the eccentric billionaire Vincent Pryce (not to be confused with Vincent Price!). Mr Pryce then sets in motion a treasure hunt across Boston, for anyone to take part in and potentially win a fortune. The clues are inspired by Edgar Allan Poe - something that Tuesday very much appreciates. She starts up a team with Archie (who is not at all who he seems to be), Dex and her teenaged Tuesday-wannabe next door neighbour, Dorry.

Tuesday’s backstory is fascinating and sad in equal measure, and it’s fortunate that she meets Dorry, a girl who misses her dead mother terribly. Tuesday misses her best friend Abby, who went missing without a trace as a 16/17 year old.

On the front cover, this looks as though it will be a YA paranormal/ horror novel. It’s not. There’s a smattering of the paranormal perhaps, but it’s certainly not a main theme. This is a mystery, where we also learn that to be yourself is the most important thing in life - as is friendship. I loved this book, and practically inhaled it on a long train journey. It’s a bit quirky, but it has a lot of heart (and hey, I like quirky!). Highly recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins for my copy of this book to read and review!

This book was also published as Tuesday Mooney speaks to Ghosts (still up for request on NetGalley) and after reading the book, I must say that this version suits it better. The ghosts play, but a minor role in it all, but they hover in the background. The black, however, is in the foreground and a significant identifier of Tuesday Mooney. She is an individual who has retained that individuality over time, mostly by avoiding relationships that usually cause people to change or alter even in minor ways. This also means that in retrospect, it is a lonely life. 

When the story begins, we are introduced to Tuesday and her friend(despite all her attempts to not acknowledge the relationship) Dex. They are vital players till a man upstages everyone by dying in an auction and leaving behind a public call for everyone to participate in a sort of treasure hunt with the final pot being most of the money he has spent years accumulating. He is eccentric, and so is everything that follows. There is a bizarre method to the madness, and the book is genuinely not for everyone.  I enjoyed it. There is more depth in the relationships explored within the pages than those books that focus only on the links and where they are the primary and sole purpose of the narrative. We have a few additional people weave in and out, and overall, I not only enjoyed the story, but it got me back my reading mojo with the flow of the story. You need to suspend belief in the 'realities' of our lives as we know it to keep up with parts of the story.

I would recommend this to people who like reading an eccentrically phrased narrative that takes some time to provide a more complete picture. 

Although I received this ARC through a pre-approved widget from the publishers and NetGalley, The review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

This is a mystery novel with a lavish sprinkling of humour and spooky-ness thrown in. It’s really enjoyable.

Tuesday Mooney works in a hospital. She researches individuals, rich people, in order to enable the hospital to campaign, set up events targeting them as potential donors. She’s good at it, Tuesday loves a puzzle. That’s why she spends time taking part in quizzes with her ex-colleague and good friend Dev.

It’s at one such event that Vincent Pryce, one of the billionaires attending, drops dead. He was looking towards Tuesday and the man – Nathaniel Arches – she was talking to when it happened. Dev had just been chatting with him and his wife. He thought that Vince and Tuesday would get along so well.

Dev’s a lot of fun and he’s the one that tells Tuesday about the treasure hunt. A rather strange obituary for Vincent has stated that a number of the treasure hunters will find, ‘win’, part of his fortune! Dev knows Tuesday won’t be able to resist the idea of working out the clues.

Then the wealthy Nathaniel Arches, Archie – the man she was talking to at the event, contacts Tuesday to ‘partner’ up so they, along with a young neighbour of Tuesdays, start to solve the clues. And so it begins!

This book has humour, mystery, charm and yet is able to gently address various difficult relationship issues whilst still getting the issue across very well. More than this it is also about healing and building better relationships.

I really liked this book – the characters Tuesday, Dev etc., are very endearing. The plot is fun and yet is very tense in places. It moves along at a really good pace and has that bit of difference that makes the book worth reading. I look forward to reading more about Tuesday, Dev and the others and would recommend this book to anyone.

Thanks

I received an email from from Rachel Quin at HarperCollins – ‘I wanted to share an exclusive invite to read Tuesday Mooney Wore Black, the witty and riveting UK debut by Kate Racculia‘. Whilst, due to personal reasons, I wasn’t sure when I would be able to put up a post I was thrilled to receive an eBook* for review for which I would like to thank Rachel and HarperCollins.

(* I have also purchased a copy.)

Ghosts aren’t real - or are they?
A disparate group of rather likeable, and vulnerable, people are separately, and sometimes jointly, trying to solve the mystery set by a dead millionaire.
The only reason I didn’t give five stars was that’s it’s a little long drawn out - I prefer a faster, sharper read.
I particularly enjoyed the final chapters, parts of which I found very moving.

i loved Tuesday - Goth extraordinaire - her kindness and a complex past add up to making her utterly attractive and smart - her escapades in researching rich donors leads her down a trail that even her best friend Dex might not have recommended - even as he eggs her on. a terrific character in a fully worked out novel of detection - i loved it and i hope there will be more. full of intriguing and amusing character, the 'dark' veneer is underscored with humour (like Vincent Pryce ... who dies flamboyantly, as he lived, and who is trigger of the treasure hunt ... highly recommended. really great find.

I was invited to review this book by the publisher through NetGalley, and I was completely taken with the title and the description so was delighted to get into the story. It came at the perfect time as well – October is a month of classic horror films for me and my husband. And some not-so-classic horror films (I wouldn’t recommend Hammer’s Vampire Circus, aside from the surprising debut of Lalla Ward as a shapeshifting vampire acrobat). This year we were working out way through the collection of Vincent Price and Richard Corman’s Poe adaptations: The Masque of the Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usherand The Ravenall featured. We also enjoyed Theatre of Blood, a later Vincent Price film with Diana Rigg. (The Ravenwas my favourite.)

Basically, I was completely in the mood for a slightly campy, slightly goth story. So when the eccentric dead billionaire turns out to be called Vincent Pryce, and his treasure hunt is themed around Poe, gothic stories, and a taste for the gleefully macabre I realised that HarperCollins had somehow intuited my plans for the spooky season and delivered the perfect companion book to me alongside my cinematographic plans. This book isn’t quite a mystery book, and it isn’t quite a ghost story, and it isn’t quite a romance, and it isn’t quite a comedy. It instead blends the best part of all of these genres to create this wonderfully bold, warm, and funny book about death and grief and all the different ways humans experience and cope with these things, wrapped up in some delightful puzzles with a gothic twist.

I loved the characters in this book. They were all unique and well defined, but they had excellent chemistry and worked well together. Despite being, as stated, a book themed around death and gothic trimmings, it wasn’t maudlin. It was gleeful and energetic and a whole lot of fun. Thursday is a great character, constantly assessing those around her, refusing to conform and outwitting everyone who writes her off as weird and not worth it. Dex is also wonderful – I particularly liked that as observers of his internal voice, and how he appeared through the eyes of his closest friend, we seemed to get a different impression of him from the one everyone else saw. At the start of the novel his boyfriend reveals he sees Dex as smooth, put-together, cutthroat and everything Dex hates about the world he works in. Dex instead sees himself as a diva, a performer, trapped inside the suit of a financier. It’s a brilliant bit of writing, you get the constant baffled frustration from Dex, and the occasional surprise of seeing him through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know him intimately to see whyhe keeps being seen like that.



Everyone in this book knows themselves and embraces themselves, or are coached to recognise their true character and potential through the treasure hunt. I’m almost sorry that Vincent dies so early on in the book because he’s a fantastic character I’d love to spend more time with and get to know. Philosophical and whimsical, with a taste for the gothic aesthetic. He sounds like so much fun.

That’s the other thing about this book – everything is so easy to picture. It’s vividly colourful, much like the old horror films I’ve been watching, actually. The colour palettes in those were so intensely saturated, where now there’s a tendency to go dark, greyscale, and faded. These old films are bright and bold, and that tracks through this book as well. The descriptions, the characters, the nuance – it’s loud and proud and does everything at 100% saturation. I really found it thoroughly joyful and a wonderful read.

Perhaps my only niggle with it is something which says more about me than the book. Tuesday keeps taking her shoes off, and there are quite a few words dedicated to her bare feet. Bare feet in carpet, how they look, how they feel on the floor. For me – look, feet are weird. They’re necessary but I find them odd. I mostly pretend they don’t exist and carry on happily. As I mentioned, however, this book is very bold in its descriptions, so the passages about feet felt a little like poking a raw nerve for me. I would happily read that entire book with all the passages about feet removed. But as I said, this is a very personal and minor narrative quirk which bothed me based on my own hangups rather than any actual flaw with the writing or narrative.

I’m unclear whether this is the first in a series or not – it feels like it could be, but at the same time it also feels as though everything in it is wrapped up pleasingly. It’s a fun book though, and one I don’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.

Briefly:

- A fun, genre-blending romp of a novel written in glorious technicolour. It’s bright and bold, with a fantastic cast of characters.
- Even though it’s a novel about death and mystery, it’s a joyful and very light in its tone. It’s perhaps more Scooby Doo than Agatha Christie, but that’s what makes it really rather wonderful. It also works for any time of year I think, I just fortuitously found it at the perfect time for me to understand all the film references in it.
- I think the feet passages probably total less than 500 words. Literally take out all the feet bits and it’s a perfect book.
- In some countries, this book is sold with the title Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts.

Rating: 5/5 – even with the feet I can’t begrudge it the full five stars because it’s really lovely.

This book was good on so many levels. The title character I found really interesting. Quirky but with a great back story and well defined character. The story itself was interesting and engaging. I was satisfied with the ending. I don't know what else I can say here except that I not only didn't want to put it down but I didn't want to finish it!

I received an ARC copy of this book from Harper Collins via net galley in exchange for an honest review.
I think the book has a narrative that is different to the masses and holds lots of potential. I enjoyed the opening expose of the challenge following Pryce's death. I felt it had a strong event line and introduced a variety of characters. I got a bit lost in the middle of it with so many developing story lines and noe of them particularly clearly defined. The latter third was again pacy bringing the threads together into an identifiable whole and I enjoyed the ending of the book.

It was a good book the spaghetti of story lining in the middle kept it from being a great one

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperFiction for allowing me to read an copy of this eARC. All views and opinions discussed here are my own.

This was such an intriguing and quirky read and is truly unique compared to anything else that i've ever read. It was a real mystery but also sort of crime noir; above all else though I felt this was all about love and friendships and the importance of living your life to enjoy it; not just to take money to the grave. I honestly really enjoyed this read and it was so whacky throughout that I couldn't help but enjoy it.

I really liked Tuesday; what an interesting character she was, and watching her breakdown later on in the book was honestly really sad. There's also such a range of interesting characters surrounding Tuesday; mainly that of Dex, Dorry, and Archie.

Although this is quite a whacky read there are some darker themes towards the end and it almost becomes a bit of a crime thriller book. This isn't a scary book though and the alternative title "Tuesday Mooney talks to Ghosts" is a bit misleading as there are no ghosts... only mental ones.

What stopped me rating it 5* was the slow pace of this book at times and some sections were so overly descriptive and just felt a bit unnecessary. It slowed the overall pace of the book down and was just a bit frustrating; I honestly mainly found this with Dorry's chapters which I admit to skimming.

Overall I enjoyed this book and thought it was an interesting and unique read.

When I first saw this book I thought it was called Tuesday [comma] Mooney Wore Black, and I was thinking Irish funerals, Colm Tóibín, James Joyce. Well, the comma turned out not to be there and Tuesday Mooney is the name of the protagonist. I'm glad I still took it on though as what we have here is an intelligent mystery story mixed with reflections on life and how it could be lived. There is a funeral, but not one anything like I've ever been to.

Filled with quirky but believable characters, Tuesday Mooney Wore Black seems like it's going to be a ghost story but has a greater psychological depth. The main characters - Tuesday, Dorry, Dex, Archie - each have regrets and secrets and in addition to solving the mystery of eccentric millionaire Vincent Pryce's grand game, they all in some way come to terms with their hurt. Tuesday learns to trust her friend, Dex, after years of being a loner and Dex learns to be perhaps not quite so needy in future. Archie learns to be his true self and Dorry realises she must relinquish her impossible desire to see her mother again.

This is a clever, funny, sad, and altogether engaging story. Dive in.

Tuesday Rooney Wore Black is as quirky as its title suggests. Kate Racculia has invented a stellar cast of characters in a story that embodies the power of friendship alongside a great deal of soul-searching. Tuesday is certainly larger than life and her job as a prospect researcher for Boston General Hospital means that she has a tenacious spirit and a tremendous eye for detail. Tuesday has an equally larger than life friend in Dex and, at his suggestion, they initially team up to compete in a treasure hunt quite unlike any other. This is pacy read with a cracking storyline and several well drawn characters. There’s a lot to like: ghosts, magic, haunted houses and lots of humour. And there’s darkness too with murder, mental health issues and grief. I absolutely loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the ARC.

Great book, funny and great story. Loved the characters Tuesday was great
Loved trying to work things out to

A well written book full of twists and turns, great characterisation and a story that will engage you from the start.
Quirky, fast paced and packed with action, what's not to like ?

Let me begin by saying this is not my usual book choice, but I decided to request it anyways, it was quirky and witty at times, Tuesday is an interesting character, I liked the treasure hunt in this story, however i found the book a bit slow to begin with. THe book was an OK read and as i said not my usual choice, and Im not sure if i would look forward to . reading any follow up TUesday Mooney books. Thank you for the eARC copy.

This is a brilliant little mystery with plenty of twists, but there was also a bit of padding here and there that didn't really offer much for me. I liked Tuesday as a character and her side kick Dex though all the characters had personalities that drew me in. I loved the TV, film and comic references of things ive loved in the past and still do now. My favourite death even featured! This really is several mysteries wrapped in an enigma and the ending left me happy that the series could continue. Great as a holiday read for those who aren't fans of chick lit! I haven't read the first in the series but this didn't stop me enjoying this book. I do plan to go and read the first to fully appreciate the brilliance that is Tuesday Mooney.

Tuesday Mooney is unusual. She does deep dives on personal information on rich people, so that the hospital she works for knows the right approach to take in order to get the largest amount of donations out of them. Loving this job means she loves a puzzle, and so when someone keels over at a party, and turns out to be a very eccentric very rich man who has left a puzzle for anyone who wants to play, with the chance at a fortune, Tuesday is in!

Dex, her best friend, money manager for a job, karaoke singing for a passion, is also drawn in, and the rich and mysterious Nathanial Arches hires Tuesday to help solve the puzzle.

It was a really enjoyable read, and one that made me want to read more about the characters! I enjoyed the puzzles, and the story was fun and fast paced!

This book is also published under "Tuesday Mooney talks to ghosts", just in case you run into that name!

Tuesday Mooney Wore Black was published on 1st October 2019 and is available to buy on Amazon and on Waterstones. I've found a link to where you can search for local bookshops, including independent!

You can follow Kate Racculia on Twitter, or through her website.

If you're interested in mysteries, then here's some others I've reviewed:

The Case of Miss Elliott: The Teahouse Detective by Baroness Orczy 🌟🌟🌟🌟

The Liar in the Library by Simon Brett 🌟🌟🌟

The Butterfly Room by Lucinda Riley 🌟🌟🌟🌟

The Furies by Katie Lowe 🌟🌟🌟🌟

I was given this book for free in return for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to Harper Collins (the publishers) for this book.

Check out my GoodReads profile to see more reviews!

A scavenger hunt to win an inheritance in the style of The Westing Game and Ready Player One, this is more focused on the existential disasters of the protagonists inner lives than a true hunt for treasure. Tuesday and Dex are quirky, memorable people, and I enjoyed being in their heads, but I would have liked more clues and fun along the way.

Tuesday Mooney Wore Black is one of my novels of the year. It is so kind and wise and a quantum leap from Kate Racculia's other novels, fine though they are. I loved the characters in this book so much, and how they interrelated. There is a central mystery in this book: a treasure hunt of sorts, but there are other layers of mystery beyond that which elevate the story. The villain in this book is absolutely awful, and you really want him to get his comeuppance. I really treasure this book. Five stars.

A game with a twist....
Tuesday Mooney has left her life, sad past and witchy goings on behind her, moving from Salem to the city of Boston working as a medical files researcher, Tuesday keeps herself to herself and only has one friendly acquaintance in the form of Dex. Until, a “chance” meeting with a billionaires son and the lives of the super rich at a function, a sudden death and invite to play a game, Tuesday gets sucked deep into the game, which takes over her life and turns it upside down.

It’s a really great story idea, and the hunt around the city to find and work out the meaning of clues was great, even some funny references thrown in, but at times it felt a little bit clunky, drawn out. There is a lot going on with each of the character’s, their backstory/past.