Mac narrates the story in her own words and sets the scene for a laid-back cozy with some zany characters.  Bizarre poetry, Jerry’s innocent psychic scams and several ghosts (including a dinosaur) all feature in this book, along with more conventional themes such as rivalry among the contestants, star-crossed love and small-town life.  There is a lot of material in here, and much of it gets sidelined, so I can only imagine that it will feature in later novels - I do hope so.  In such profusion it all gets rather bewildering, and such a lengthy period spent setting the scene means that the body is a long time in arriving.  If a love of detective fiction is your sole reason for reading this, then you might be disappointed, but there are a lot of other things to enjoy as well.  I am not normally in favor of books being longer than they are, but this one could have done with either more pages or less detail.  It will be interesting to see how the series works out.