Swamp Spook

By: Jana DeLeon

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's Summary

When black cats roam, and spooks are seen, Come celebrate, it’s Halloween.

Sinful, Louisiana, really knows how to throw a party, and it goes all out for Halloween. The weeklong celebration kicks off with a maze of horror in the park built of hay bales. And Fortune has the perfect assignment - the executioner. Her scene comes complete with a head block, a hatchet, and a fake body with removable head. It’s the perfect setup...for a crime.

When Fortune returns from break and realizes the body in her scene is a real one and not the prop, she knows trouble is coming. Before she can shake a broomstick, Celia Arceneaux has raised the alarm and the state police show up to take over the investigation. With Carter on the sidelines and Fortune the prime suspect, Swamp Team 3 sets out to catch a real monster.

©2018 Jana DeLeon (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

Another huge Thank You...

...to Audible listener/reviewer Wayne (Matthews, NC). If it were not for him I would have never even looked at this series. I really enjoy Jana DeLeon's Shaye Archer but this series seemed off of my beaten path. Anyway, I've just finished the last book (so far ) in this light, fun, fast paced original series. Each book is an adventure. The four central characters are very well developed and very often humorous.
Cassandra Campbell narrates all of these books beautifully.
This series is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
If you found this review helpful please indicate so.
Thank You.

The fun and mystery continue!

SWAMP SPOOK is book 13 in the outstanding Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon. Audible classify it as a cozy mystery and I suppose it is, but it is more fun than most of that genre. Fortune Redding has now retired from the CIA and has her private investigator license. The geriatric ex-spy pair Ida Belle and Gertie are helping her. As always they manage to frustrate Fortune's boyfriend (and local sheriff's deputy) Carter LeBlanc by stepping all over his cases. I love this series! Cassandra Campbell narrates perfectly.

4 Stars for this spooky Halloween special

4 Stars! Swamp Spook is book 13 in A Miss Fortune Mystery series. The series is set in Sinful, Louisiana, USA and follows Fortune, who up until book 12 was a CIA assassin in hiding, and old ladies Gertie and Ida Belle, who are lifelong Sinful residents and ex-spy war veterans, as they help solve a string of various crimes and murders.

This series is the first series of Cozy Mystery books that I have read. Cozy Mystery is a new-to-me genre and I am hooked. Once I listened to the first Miss Fortune Mystery series book, I couldn't stop. So far, I have listened to all of the books back to back and I'm not going to stop until there aren't any more.

I recommend reading/listening to these books in order since each book builds upon the prior book's story and it makes it much more entertaining and enjoyable to go in order. I'm sure you could still enjoy these books as standalone but it won't be the same.

In Swamp Spook, Sinful is having their week-long Halloween celebrations and all of the townspeople help out where they can. Fortune plays a character in the scary maze and in her scene she beheads a (fake) person. During the 30 minute break, someone swaps the fake dead dude with a real one. Of course, Celia gets involved and it is makes for a hilarious scene of realizing the fake dead guy is a real one. I love to see horrible things happen back to her. Her character is a lesson in karma. I hope she really gets shut down once and for all in one of these books, although it would take away a lot of drama so I don't know... Anyway, this twist certainly looks bad for Fortune, especially since she let the town in on her true identity as a CIA agent in the last book and people think she might be dangerous. Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie jump right into investigation mode to try to solve the murder and a few other crimes along the way.

If you like books with a big dose of humor, this is the series for you. I have found myself laughing out loud too many times to count.

The same narrator reads for the whole series. She did great for the first 11 books, but the past two have seemed sloppy, almost like she is just rushing through. She is making errors such as incorrect words read and using the wrong character name. That was disappointing. I do like that her voices are consistent from book to book.

Best story yet

I really liked this story. Less cooky than previous books. This one had more of a story plot instead of 1/3 of the book about food. A few things bothered me though.... Fortune couldn’t see under water because the murky water affected her “retinas”??? Since the retina is on the back surface of the interior eye, I’m finding that hard to understand. And I wish SO VERY MUCH that Gerties last name is pronounced correctly: “A-Bear” NOT “He-Bert”

SAID

I’m only in the first chapter
I lost count on how many times this author said, SAID

I said
Gurty said
Adibelle said

Talk about annoying.

So incredibly bad

Ok overall

It wasn’t a bad story, but certain aspects of the ending were figured out very early in the story. Partially figured out who was involved and definitely the “how”.

Great

Another fun installment. Didn’t laugh as much as the previous but it was still very enjoyable.

Halloween comes to Sinful!

Former CIA assassin Fortune Redding returns to entertain and excite listeners in Swamp Spook by Jana Deleon. Halloween has come to Sinful, Louisiana, and Fortune finds herself recruited to play the executioner at the haunted maze, a role particularly suited to her. In it, she brandishes an axe and pretends to chop off the head of a person in the form of a dummy. But after the break in the middle of the maze event, Fortune returns to her position to find the body of a real man with his head cut off.

Things in the case get stranger and stranger, and Fortune’s arch enemy, Celia Arceneaux, brings in the state police, with accusations against Fortune as the murderer and Deputy Carter Leblanc as unable to handle the case because he is dating the chief suspect. Since Carter finds himself sidelined completely, even after Fortune is vindicated, he takes a move he never dreamed he’d ever make: He hires Fortune, with Ida Bell and Gertie, to use their detection agency to get to the bottom of the case.

Swamp Spook is a delightful addition to the Miss Fortune mystery series. With characteristic humor, Deleon gives us a further view of Sinful and its quirky residents. I enjoyed the creative plot and its great twists and turns, with some significant surprises for us readers. The Swamp Team 3 trio of Fortune, Ida Bell, and Gertie find new creative ways of detecting and getting themselves into and sneakily out of trouble.

Cassandra Campbell returns to perform the audio edition of this book. As with all the books in this series, Campbell does an excellent job of making this book delightful to listen to. She makes Fortune seem a very real person, a woman we would love to meet face to face and not just in the book. With excellent voices for each of the characters, Campbell makes Sinful come alive. I have read some of the books in this series visually when I didn’t want to wait for the audiobook to be released, and the audio versions have proven to be much more delightful than the print versions.

I truly enjoyed listening to Swamp Spook and give it five stars!

from Louisiana

Better than a typical cozy mystery. The characters are exaggerated but the types are recognizable. The only problem I had was the jarring pronunciation of Gertie Hebert’s name. It is not pronounced He-Bert but rather as A-Bear.

Great story

As being born and raised in Louisiana, my only complaint is the pronunciations of some names. Hebert in particular.

Swamp Spook

This is a strange mystery where nothing turns out to be what it first seems. With fun and mayhem along the way, this story had nothing but belly laughs all the way through. Read brilliantly again by Cassandra Campbell.

love the books

make you laugh out loud but there are mistakes in the narrative shame thay it's exclusive to audible I thought they would have done better

Another entertaining adventure for Fortune et al

P.I. Fortune and the dynamic duo Ida and Gertie are embroiled in all sorts of convoluted antics as they try to solve the mystery of a beheaded corpse which turns up during the Sinful Halloween week festivities, after apparently having died from "natural" causes. We should know by now that nothing is natural in Sinful Louisiana - particularly Gertie's ideas of sartorial elegance and Celia's machinations to implicate Fortune in everything that goes awry in Sinful. The mysteries are eventually solved in a satisfying way, but of course the real joy of these books is the interplay and repartee between the main characters amidst the eccentric characters and ridiculous situations which arise. And then there are the crocs. - and the contents of Gerties bag....
Cassandra Campbell's narration is a perfect fit to the stories. If you have enjoyed the previous 12 books, this one will certainly spur you on to read the 14th! You could probably read this one without reading the others first - but I would advise against it!

Funny, and Clever Title as Fortune is an ex Spook!

Halloween is just not that big in England, but after hearing the activities they had arranged in Sinful, I wish it was. I know it's a story, but the Halloween celebrations must have some basis in fact.
As usual Gertie gets everyone in trouble, Idabelle gets practical and Fortune gets the bad guy.
Plenty of twists and turns along the way, but enough clues to make you realise you got part of it right.
I like the way Fortune and Carter's romantic friendship is never soppy, or downright 'descriptive'.
All the books seem to have been planned with an overarching storyline as things from a couple of books back pop up, and as Emmeline's new friend turns up at the start and very end of this story, I'm betting they play a bigger part in stories to come.