Before You Press Play
- Narrator: Greg Boudreaux swings between gruesome murder detail and a comic dead roommate on a single credit, with no cast to share the register.
- Subjects: Chosen family among the living and the dead, an established couple deepening, a mystery whose witnesses have vanished
- Tone: Snarky, warm and gently macabre
- Bottom line: A confident second volume for anyone already invested, and no place at all to start.
Hiro sees the dead, and has spent a whole life being talked at by them, which is the useful half of an inconvenient gift and the reason Detective Maddox Booker keeps him close. Then a man dies and his ghost is simply not there. Nine hours and twelve minutes of audiobook follow a case in which the witnesses have gone quiet, and in places hostile, and in which the one person equipped to interview them is taken out of his bed in the middle of the night.
Where This One Lands
Arithmetic disposes of this page's rating block quickly, and the proof is short enough to print in full. Three whole-star votes can total twelve, thirteen, fourteen or fifteen stars, which display as 4.0, 4.3, 4.7 and 5.0. No arrangement of three grades produces 4.6, which is the figure this listing shows. Underneath it sit five separate written responses, each carrying a grade of its own, which is already two more voters than the counter admits to.
The pool's single reservation is structural, and it comes from a four-star in March 2022 that likes almost everything else. That entry credits the signature Alice Winters register, the humor, the banter, the quirky interactions and some solid action scenes, praises the growth in the relationship between Hiro and Maddox, and says it adored the spotlight given to the ghostly supporting cast. Its complaint is about the route to the resolution rather than the resolution itself, which is a specific and fair thing to object to in a mystery.
You are buying a paranormal detective romance with a comic engine, second in a pair of books about the same couple. The murders are handled seriously. Almost nothing else is.
Chosen family is the phrase a March 2025 five-star lands on, and it calls the version here an odd take on it, which is exactly right for a household that includes a living detective, a medium, a friend named Natalie and a dead roommate who will not stop harassing anyone. That response wishes it had found Alice Winters sooner, rates this as good as the first book, and notes that both Hiro's abilities and the reader's understanding of the spirit realm move forward rather than repeating.
Greg Boudreaux takes the whole recording alone, and the structure makes that a genuine assignment. The book is built from two alternating first-person accounts, Hiro's and Maddox's, each labeled by name on the page and each with its own register, one anxious and wry, the other blunt and protective. Strip the labels away, which is what audio does, and the separation has to be carried by voice from the first clause of every switch. Add a supporting cast of ghosts who are largely there to be funny, and one voice is doing a great deal of traffic control.
Comedy is the reason the series works at all, and it is unusually well aimed. A book about a man who can see murder victims should not be able to sustain a running joke about a roommate who died and stayed anyway, and this one does, without ever treating the deaths themselves as material.
Things to Know Before Starting Ghost of Truth
Preparation is what the earliest response recommends, in an entry dated January 18, 2022 that went back and reread the first book before starting this one, and reports being glad of it: no stopping to work out who was who, and no lost time. That entry also praises a mystery that kept it guessing and backtracking without being able to pin the crimes on anyone. It was filed roughly three weeks ahead of the February 11, 2022 release date printed on this page, so what it is grading is the text.
The description gives its own ending away, and does it on purpose. After promising action, mystery, humor and romance, it states plainly that more is planned for this couple, that the mystery is solved, and that the ending is a happy one. Romance readers will read that as the reassurance it was written to be. Anyone here mainly for the puzzle has just been told how the puzzle comes out.
Metadata is thin to the point of unhelpful. The tag field is empty. The series is named as Medium Trouble and numbered two, and the title of book one appears nowhere on the record, surfacing only inside a reader's response. For a series the pool insists must be taken in order, leaving the starting point unnamed is a real obstacle.
Recommended For
Order matters, and a July 2022 five-star says so with an exclamation mark: a paranormal detective story with romance, second in a series that has to be read in sequence. That entry describes strong snark, real surprises, character development it rates as fantastic, and a plot it calls twisty without ever crossing into horror. That last distinction will matter to some listeners more than anything else on this page.
Listen if you want a queer paranormal romance where the couple is already established and the book is about deepening rather than meeting, if banter is the thing you go to a series for, or if you want murder plots handled without dread. Not for you if you have not read the first book, if you want a mystery whose outcome is not printed in the description, or if comedy sitting next to homicide strikes you as the wrong tone.
Alice Winters published this independently in February 2022 and it has collected a rating block that describes nothing real. The recording underneath is the second half of a story that knows exactly what it is for.
Before You Listen
Do you need the first book before this audiobook?
Yes. The series field reads Medium Trouble, book two, and the listing never names book one anywhere on the record. The description opens with Hiro already embedded in Detective Maddox Booker's life and already surrounded by ghosts he counts as friends, so you would be joining the relationship at its midpoint.
How graphic are the murders in this audiobook?
More than the description suggests. A June 2024 five-star describes gruesome detail around the killings sitting directly beside a dead roommate played for laughs, and calls the combination something that flows anyway. Expect the register to swing hard rather than to settle.
Does the mystery get resolved, or carry into another book?
Resolved, and the page tells you so before you begin. The description confirms in advance that the case closes and the couple gets its ending, while promising further books for them later. That is written as reassurance for romance readers, and it does hand you the shape of the outcome in advance.
Is this a romance with a mystery attached, or the reverse?
The description answers by its own structure, handing Hiro the missing ghost and the village that looks ordinary from outside, and handing Maddox the move-in question and the abduction. The case supplies the plot; the weight sits with the couple and the household of ghosts around them.
