A Reading With Cass Donovan - Guest Post, Review, & Giveaway

I'm happy to welcome Cass Donovan to Cozy Up With Kathy today. You can find Cass in the pages of the Bay Island Psychic Mystery series by Lena Gregory. CLAIRVOYANT AMD PRESENT DANGER is the third book in the series and was released earlier this month.

A Reading With Cass Donovan

By Lena Gregory

I’m Cass Donovan, owner of Mystical Musings, a small psychic shop on Bay Island. Thank you for dropping by today. You’re just in time, too. I’m about to start a group reading at Mystical Musings, and I figured it would be fun to give you a peek at a group reading from my point of view. So, come on in, have a seat at one of the many tables scattered throughout the shop, and we’ll get started.

Usually, Stephanie, one of my best friends, introduces me. She’ll talk a little about what’s about to happen. She’ll tell my clients I will walk through the room and seek out those whose dearly departed loved ones are trying to contact them.

I only have a vague idea of what she says, because we worked it out ahead of time. While she’s speaking, I study my guests. Everyone has small tells that alert you to their thoughts and feelings. If you are good at reading those tells, which I am, thanks to years of psychiatric training and great gut instincts, you can infer a lot about a person.

But I don’t do readings to con people, I do it to help them. Unfortunately, I had to leave my psychiatric practice, and I will never go back to New York City. I enjoy the peace of living on Bay Island too much to ever go back to the hustle and bustle of city life, or the bad memories that plague me there. So I use my training to help people in another way.

To start, I can assume most of the people attending a reading expect me to contact the dead. Of course, there are skeptics, but that’s to be expected, and they’re easy enough to pick out that I can avoid them with no problem.

Right now, I am looking at a woman I can tell needs my help. She is twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Just a nervous habit, or something more? I’ll have to figure it out. She has a sad look about her. Not the raw pain of fresh grief, but the kind of sadness that comes with having lost someone who was important to her and whose loss still affects her, just not recently.

The woman sitting next to her, much younger, her daughter, maybe, pats her hands.

I approach slowly, giving her time to notice I’ve focused on her. If she seems unwilling to participate, I’ll back off right away. She seems okay, though. She sits up straighter, so I figure she’s ready to chat.

The man sitting at the next table is a regular, and he knows my routine, so he stands and offers me his chair.

I accept, thank him, and pull it closer to the woman, creating a more intimate setting for our talk. I start off kind of general, since I’m not sure yet what’s wrong. “You seem worried about something.”

She nods and a tear tips over her lashes. “I am.” A strong sense of loss surrounds her.

“You’ve lost something important.”

Her eyes widen, and she nods again. “Yes, I have.”

That one wasn’t so hard to figure out, but now I have to figure out what she lost and where she lost it. “When was the last time you saw it?”

She frowns and shakes her head. “I can’t remember. My husband left it in his drawer. It was so important to him.”

“Well, why don’t we see if he can help us guide you to it?”

She pulls herself together. “Oh, that would be great.”

Now I have a lot more information than I did at the start. I know her husband is the one who’s gone, which I suspected from the way she was twisting her ring. I know she lost something, which is usually an easy problem to solve. Most people, given the right prodding, can remember where they last saw something and be led back to it. This is actually a common request.

Now I will focus on finding what she lost, but I won’t go into how just yet. After all, I don’t want to divulge all my secrets, but be sure to pick up a copy of Death at First Sight, Occult and Battery, or Clairvoyant and Present Danger if you want an even more detailed glimpse into what I do.

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Review

CLAIRVOYANT AMD PRESENT DANGER By Lena Gregory

The Third Bay Island Psychic Mystery

While Cass gives psychic readings at her shop Mystical Musings, she never considered herself a psychic, merely a person very good at reading people, a skill cultivated during her time as a psychiatrist. Now Cass is concerned that she may be losing her mind as the woman from the nightmares that have been leaving her sleep deprived is now appearing while she's awake and pleading for help. A ghost? A psychic vision? Madness? When the ghostly apparition leads Cass to human bones buried on the beach Cass must consider that she truly has psychic abilities. Psychic or not, she knows she must uncover the identity of the apparition and what happened to her. Will she discover a connection between the suspicious man who came for a reading and the gallery owner? More importantly, will she find time to get Beast some training? 

This engaging series just keeps getting better and CLAIRVOYANT AMD PRESENT DANGER is my favorite book thus far. A slight departure from previous books, while there is a dead body and a killer, the mystery doesn't spend the majority of the time around either. The mystery at first is about Cass's mental health and a missing woman as well as the possible connection between them. In fact, CLAIRVOYANT AMD PRESENT DANGER is a book about connections. Connecting the new people in town with their pasts and their dealings with Cass, the connections of the bones on the beach with the missing girl, the connections of the friends and their significant others, and ultimately, the connection between Cass and her gift.

I love the friendship between Cass, Bee, and Stephanie. Time and time again they demonstrate what true friendship is. Beast brings unrestrained love, fun and joy to the story, although it is about time he gets some training. The mystery of the missing woman is intriguing on so many levels with a variety of clues, suspicious behavior, and suspects. Lena Gregory knocks it our of the park with this character driven, fast paced mystery.

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