I recently picked up another Karen Robards book, Superstition, that combined some supernatural elements with a mystery.

Fifteen years ago on Pawleys Island, a young girl was murdered and her two friends disappeared. Nicole Sullivan had lived on the island several years ago. Now Lenora, Nicole’s mother, and her current husband lived on the island. Nicole was a reporter for a news television show and decided that a story about the murders would help her career. She set up a live broadcast and was going to have Lenora, a psychic, try to contact the girls. The mayor wasn’t happy about Nicole’s planned story and tried to stop it. After the show, one of the producers was murdered and Nicole was almost killed as well. Her boss thought that what was going on would make a huge story and Nicole returned to do more broadcasts to keep the story. Nicole ended up spending time with the Chief of Police, Joe. Someone else was murdered and a third attack came very close to Nicole once again. Nicole and Joe started a sexual relationship while trying to figure out who the killer was.

Superstition was the first Karen Robards book I’ve read that dealt with ghosts. Many people around Pawleys Island believed that the house where the young girl was murdered was haunted. Lenora was a well known psychic that had even had her own television show for a while. Something supernatural was going on and there were ghost sightings. The ghosts played a very small part in the book. That disappointed me since I had hoped that the ghost part of the story would be stronger. More than one character occasionally saw ghosts, which did help to keep things interesting.

Superstition started off sharing some information on the murder of the young girl before jumping into the main story. Nicole came up with the idea for doing the story on the murder mainly because she thought it would help her career. She was a reporter that seemed to think that made her qualified to start digging around to try to solve the murders. She did have a lot of contacts and people were willing to talk to her since she had lived there years before and some of her family was currently living there. Nicole used the fact that the killer had contacted her to talk her boss into sending her back to work on the story. She did manage to uncover some clues and she didn’t seem as concerned with her own safety as she really should have been. She and Joe had some disagreements because of her insistence on continuing to work on the story when she knew she was in danger and possibly a target. There were suspenseful scenes throughout the book that did help keep me interested in what was going on. The mystery was interesting, though it could have been a little stronger.

Nicole and Joe met soon after Superstition started. They didn’t make the best first impression on each other. They did end up spending more time together once everything started happening. They hadn’t known each other that long when they first had sex. That might bother some readers. There were sexual situations and a few sex scenes between them included in the book. The sex scenes were descriptive and might be too graphic for some readers. I didn’t think the scenes were that explicit. The relationship had a few complications because Joe didn’t think Nicole should still be doing her reports about the murders and trying to solve them herself. The relationship was important without being the main focus of the book.

Nicole was pulled into dangerous situations right from the start of Superstition. She did some not so smart things a few times that did make her look stupid. She, and even Joe, ended up in a few extreme situations that they somehow managed to get out of. Robards has done that to some degree in every book by her that I have read. In other books, the situations were very bizarre and Robards had the characters managing to escape in some equally bizarre way. I think she was trying to make the books more suspenseful, but for me the opposite actually happened instead. Those situations got old after a while and just made me roll my eyes. I was glad that Robards didn’t do that as much in Superstition.

Nicole was a very driven woman looking to advance her career. She loved her mother and sister, Olivia, but she got irritated by them at times. Nicole was good at her job though she didn’t always think things through before acting. Livvy was going through a divorce while pregnant and was very moody. It was hard to like her. Lenora was also a flat character, mostly going on about some issues she was having with her psychic abilities. Joe was really the only other decently developed character and he wasn’t developed as much as Nicole. A lot about him was a mystery for a long time. He hadn’t been on the island for very long and he tended to keep to himself for the most part. He got very frustrated with Nicole when she kept putting herself in situations that were dangerous.

Superstition was an entertaining book that I did enjoy. I would have liked it more if the mystery was a bit strong and if the supernatural elements were featured more. People that have read and liked other books by Robards may also like this one.

Karen Robards Book Reviews
Bait ~ Beachcomber ~

Recommended: Yes