'FUNERAL DAZE'...A SURFBOARD WHIZ AND A 12 YR OLD MORTICIAN BRING LAUGHS, TEARS AND THRILLS

 Funeral Daze by Dorian Box (2023)

               Writing this review, I find myself breaking out into a wide grin just remembering how much fun I had reading it....and how much it left me clamoring for more adventures for its lead characters.....

           I could never imagine telling anyone that some book would make them laugh out loud and bring them to tears all the way through......sometimes simultaneously.

            "Funeral Daze" did that for me.....all the way through. And I always considered myself a pretty tough audience for any author who tries that 'laughs 'n tears' double whammy on a reader. 

             How could I resist the oddest and yet most lovable combination of a Guardian-and-Child matchup......Florida surfer Danny Teakwell, a grieving widower at loose ends and Jessica Jewell, 12 year old precocious force-0f-nature and skilled in all mortuary arts and sciences from being raised in her family's funeral home. 

            They first came across each other in the author's 'Psycho-Tropics', when Jessica was seven and Danny, framed by a psychopath, stood accused of first degree murder. 

             Now it's Jessica who's in peril while her parents flee from cartel gangsters who threatened them and seized their funeral home. The cartel's master plan - stuff overweight corpses with cocaine packages for easier nationwide smuggling.

               Now in hiding, Jessica's desperate parents ask Danny to look after their daughter, who's on an unstoppable quest to expose and thwart the cartel.  This does not sit well, as you might guess with the cartel's brutal chief enforcer, who favors death to eliminate all obstacles.....including children. 

              Helping out this unlikely investigative duo (and jacking up the laugh-out-loud quota)  is Fink , Danny's so-called lawyer. But then again, Fink, armed with an impossibly convoluted gift of gab, did manage to finesse a 'not guilty'" on Danny's murder charge before anyone found out Fink hadn't yet passed his Bar exam. 

               I would defy anybody to not fall in love with these characters.........as slowly and surely, the emotionally closed off Danny finds his heart warmed as he  attempts caring for Jessica, whose take-no-prisoners invulnerability masks the sweet, aching heart of an outcast lonely child.

                After finishing  "Funeral Daze",  I tried to remember the last time I encountered a book that actually delivered on its advertised promise to have you giggling while you shed a tear or two. This one's the real deal....a genuine 5 star laugh-getter and tearjerker., and with thrills 'n chills thrown in. By far one of the most entertaining books of 2023.  (*****)