Much Ado in the Moonlight

Author: Lynn Kurland
Published: April 25, 2006 (Jove)
Category: Paranormal Romance

I first read Lynn Kurland in The Queen in Winter, a collection of stories by four authors. I really enjoyed her story, so I decided to give a full Kurland novel a shot.

I can definitely say that Kurland does not write flimsy, shallow romance. In Much Ado in the Moonlight, Victoria McKinnon, a great director of Shakespearean plays is given the opportunity to direct Hamlet in a Scottish castle. When she arrives in Scotland, she finds that the castle and inn she's staying in are haunted. The inn ghosts aren't just your run-of-the-mill ghosts; they're Victoria's ancestors, a group of (former) men bent on matchmaking their descendents. Apparently, Victoria's older brother and sister have already made matches thanks to their ghostly grandfathers.

For Victoria, the ghosts have chosen Laird Connor MacDougal, a big manly Scot, complete with kilt. Unfortunately for Victoria, he's a ghost too.

Yes, the idea is a lot to bend your brain around. I struggled with my ability to suspend disbelief when I realized Victoria and Connor were supposed to end up together, and my ability to suspend disbelief goes quite a ways.

So how does Victoria wind up with the burly laird? Time travel of course!! All she has to do is time travel back to medieval Scotland and save Connor before he gets murdered by a deceitful French minstrel. Of course, Victoria has to learn how to use a knife, speak Gaelic, ride a horse, basic survival skills, and use a faery ring to travel between their times. Everything works out in the end, and Connor travels into the future, but has no idea that his former ghostly self had already professed love to Victoria. In another instance of suspension of disbelief, all of Connor's ghostly memories come back to him in dreams, both waking and sleeping.

It turns out that Kurland has a lot of these ghostly matchmaking books and there's a family tree in the back of the book that shows which books correspond to which sibling or ancestor. There are a LOT of characters in just the one book I read, so much that there's a cast list in the front matter (ha ha, I'm using my production jargon).

I'm not really sure if I'd read another one of Kurland's books because most of them seem tied into this family tree and it wasn't a very passionate relationship. I didn't buy the Victoria-Connor match, and I'm not sure if it was the whole ghost thing. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 5/10.