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Ghost Business (Boneyard Key #2) by Jen DeLuca

3.5 Stars!!

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley for a complimentary copy of the book for review. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

While I enjoyed this, I'll admit I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped.

While I liked getting to see more of Boneyard Key, at the same time, this didn't exactly feel like Boneyard Key. In the last one, there was a lot more...interaction(?) with the ghosts and they had a lot more presence. Here, even with the issue of dueling ghost tours, they kind of almost took a backseat. I did like the fact that things were explored a bit more (Sophie working with Theo to update the Boneyard Key book, the stuff Tristan found out regarding the Beach Bum, etc), but there wasn't as much of the ghosts, at least IMO.

Sophie was pretty great. I liked her in the last book and it was interesting getting to see more of her in this one. I will admit that I kind of wished she'd had Theo as her MMC, but I get the feeling that he's going to have his own story coming up soon (well, I hope anyway! There's a lot of potential that was dropped in that regard!), but I did like that this showed the way she and Theo have become friends/research partners in their journey to update the history book. I would have liked a little more on that though; we know they've already updated Sarah's story, but it would have been cool to see what other stories they'd been able to update. While I understand Sophie's anger initially over Tristan and his tour, I did like that she at least didn't fully turn her back on him. She was a little snippy occasionally but she didn't prevent anyone from letting him in and she even helped him to an extent. Then nights changed and stuff started moving forward. After she got over herself/little pity party with Tristan leaving, I did like the choices she made and the decision she made in regards to the tours and what she wanted to do to help Tristan out.

Tristan frustrated me at the beginning. He struts himself into a haunted town and is upset that they're leaning into the ghosts. Whether or not the ghosts were real, the town used the leverage it provided and he's upset about it. Like, what? Then his frustration that Sophie had a ghost tour that he didn't know about. He himself mentioned notes of things like "grabbed something here after the ghost tour" and he dismissed it because she didn't have a website. What the heck does that have to do with anything?! All it would have taken was a couple of questions or even a modicum of research beyond whatever he didn't do (he did something because he thought there wasn't one here, but we're never told what he did and again, it would have been really easy to use words and ask). While I was frustrated with Tristan's made up stories initially (he could have at minimum managed to work some things related to Boneyard Key into his scripts; even if the stories themselves were made up, he has a haunted town with tons of stories to pull from), I did like the way he turned it around at the end, to allow his and Sophie's tours to run in town. It would have been interesting to see more of things with his father; beating him/showing that Tristan could handle things was clearly a big part of his drive but then the end happened and it's like Tristan just stuck around and there it is. There wasn't even a conversation with Eric about it. For something that was as big a driving force in the way Tristan was handling things, I just wanted a little more on him.

This book releases September 9th, 2025.

Storygraph Review

Goodreads Review

Format: ARC on Kindle Book releases September 9th, 2025

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oof

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Thank you to everyone who made themselves visible and heard yesterday. These signs are my favorite ones from Minneapolis, including toddlers holding a Black Lives Matter sign and a sign that said “Trump I do not like how you act”

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tiny ghost fears

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