Ghost Trouble
Ghost Trouble: The Casefiles of Eli Mothersbaugh is a collection of mystery fantasy short stories by American writer Richard Parks, gathering together the stories featuring his ghost hunter character Eli Mothersbaugh. It was first published as an ebook on Kindle in October 2011; a trade paperback edition was issued by Canemill Publishing in January 2013. Summary. In an alternate near future, the existence of "bio-remnants" (ghosts) has been scientifically proven, making humanity cognizant of the paranormal and the problems sometimes associated with it. A government agency, the Bureau of Bio-Remnant Reconciliation, has been established to deal  with them, and that's the job of field agent Eli Mothersbaugh, physically sensitive to ghosts' psychic energy fields and possessed of the latest high tech detection gear. He is aided in four of the last six cases by academic Bonnie Simmer, whom he meets in the story "Diva." The book collects all twelve of Eli's adventures, including five previously unpublished. Reception. Reviewer Don D'Ammassa puts "'The God of Children' [among] my two personal favorites" in the stories that appeared in Parks's first short story collection, "The Ogre's Wife". He cites the four Eli Mothersbaugh tales appearing  in Parks's second collection, "Worshipping Small Gods", as evidence their writer is not "a one note author," noting their "contemporary settings and a much more somber tone ... closer to horror fiction, [though] the approach is more matter of fact and there is little actual menace, though certainly considerable mystery. ... I liked 'A Hint of Jasmine' and 'Diva' the best of these." "Publishers Weekly" highlights "Voices in an Empty Room" as among the stories particularly noteworthy in its review of "Worshipping Small Gods", finding it "[t]he most compelling entry" in the collection. Ray Olson of "Booklist" calls the "stories [that ] feature benevolent ghostbuster Eli Mothersbaugh of Canemill, Mississippi, ... so fine, sensitive, and southern that Eudora Welty might approve of them." Richard Larson calls the Mothersbaugh stories "about truth, as any good mystery story should be: the visible truth, the hidden truth, the false truth, and the real truth ... often conflicting, especially when people don't want to know the truth at all ... they want the ghosts gone, but they rarely want to deal with why the ghosts are there in the first place." He notes that the series "creates a hybrid genre—science fiction/fantasy/mystery—that convincingly and delightfully  creates a world ... in which the past is a bothersome but ever-present encroachment upon daily life." Regarding the individual tales, he feels "A Hint of Jasmine" "clips along like any solid mystery with a steady drip of clues," while rating "Voices in an Empty Room" a "weaker story" and "Hanagan's Kiyomatsu, 1923" "a simple trotting out of Parks's developing formula." "Diva," on the other hand, is "sweet and unabashedly sentimental, a journey to restore things to the way they once were, and it functions strongly as an end to the arc by commenting on what has come  before." Larson praises it for combining "all the notable aspects of Parks's skill set: compassion for his protagonist, a mystery to be solved, an endearing love story, a past to uncover, and the quirkiness that is painfully lacking in some of the more minor stories."