Paranormal Nonsense (Blue Moon Investigations, #1) by Steve Higgs

Paranormal Nonsense (Blue Moon Investigations, #1) Reviews

• 
  Ann Marie

  Whereas I like the premise - that of a paranormal investigator who doesn't believe in the paranormal - this book is in dire need of a good editor. Both from a grammatical standpoint (punctuation, run on sentences, and word choice - "fine-nabbed pen", anyone?) and for content.
  
  There is far too much time spent on how Tempest must swing by his house to let his 2 dachshunds out or take them for a walk (and I am an avowed "dog person"). He also spends rather a lot of time musing about his diet, which makes him come across as a self-righteous, food-obsessed prat. Then there are the sexist/misogynistic parts. I don't usually comment on writing in this vein, but his is thinly veiled at best: Mr. Wriggly is oft mentioned in connection with a "hot" woman; the token "fat" woman is referred to as a walrus (because of course she also has an unruly bit of upper lip hair); and even the chirpy barista across the road that he flirts with is described as a few pounds heavier than desirable. It would be nice to think that a man could perform his work adequately without constantly pondering which of the multiple women throwing themselves at him he should bed, but perhaps that's my naivety showing.
  
  Undecided at this point whether the premise of the series is good enough for me to take a deep breath and try the next book.
• 
  Montzalee Wittmann

  Terrific fun!
  
  Paranormal Nonsense by Steve Highs is about a guy that wants to start a Private Investigation business but the advertising agent typed Paranormal Investigation instead. He found he was getting a lot of work debunking the paranormal claims and solving the mysteries. In this one he deals with a Bigfoot, poltergeist, and vampire cult. He also has two little dachshunds!
  It's a clever and enjoyable book!
• 
  Ginger Vampyre

  This book is the literary equivalent to dragging my eyes over sandpaper. Set in England with a British author the english is a bit different for an American reader, but that is not the issue. First off, this is not a Paranormal genre book despite how it is advertised; the protagonist is a "paranormal investigator" who debunks the mystical. So not really happy with the bait and switch. More over, it feels like the author is using writing as his therapy to adjust to being a civilian again. Not opposed to the concept, but it doesn't make for great reading. And now lets talk about some of the writing points;
  The protagonist, Tempest, has taken it upon himself to investigate these so called "vampire" murders. When talking to the friends of one of the victims. the author literally writes about one question and writes "the conversation went much the same way" for the rest of the information gathering. Higgs spends more time writing about the contents of the character's refrigerator and cupboards, or describing in inane detail the drinking buddies, than he does putting actual anything in the investigation. Even the first case we see is written like that. More time is spent on describing the various ways the clients are old than into the effort of catching the poltergeist. Tempest's dogs get more word time than the victims, the investigation, or the clues combined. There is even the audacity of saying "I'm not vain. but..." and then describes every woman in the story either by her boobs or by how unappealing she is. And reading so called "locker room talk" dialogue is physically nauseating.
• 
  Alison Moseley

  Honestly completely puerile - there’s only so many times you can go on about the main character’s erections that it gets old.
• 
  Lynne

  This was a DNF (did not finish) for me. I was sucked in by a post on Facebook (which I now realize was made by the author himself) saying that the book was laugh-out-loud hilarious. Which it is not. Not even close.
  
  I would not have bought the book had I realized it was self-published. My experience with self-pubs is disappointing, and this one was too for the same reason they are all disappointing. It REALLY needed editing and sharpening. It needed another set of critical eyes before being released. I'm going to have to be more careful about this when ordering books online.
  
  I liked the idea of a guy investigating and de-bunking paranormal activity but that didn't actually seem to be what it was about.
  
  For me, the last turn-off was the whole macho thing around the main character. He is recently out of the army and yet has the means to buy a shiny new red Porsche. Cue the male fantasy of a guy attracting chicks in a hot car. The character refers to a female police officer as "Officer Hotstuff" and carries a condom at all times in case a "lady" is interested. I think this is the stuff that the author thinks is funny but it was super irritating and condescending. Perhaps men will like the book?
  
  Anyway, kudos to the author for getting his book out there. I hope he does well. It's just not my cup of tea.
• 
  Anita Hargreaves

  Entertaining read
  
  Ex Army man, Tempest takes voluntary redundancy and decides to open his own Private Investigation Agency but a typo in the newspapers class him as Paranormal Investigative Agency. Taking advantage of this opportunity he debunks his clients cases. A wannabee Vampire Cult are hiding a killer. This was a nice change to read a book based on a mans point of view. Who knew men's thoughts were so randy.
• 
  Brian Clegg

  There's something very appealing about the combination of crime solving and fantasy - especially with a light touch of humour too, evident, for example, in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. I was a little wary about the cover of Paranormal Nonsense, which seemed more Mills and Boon than anything, but thought I'd give it a go.
  
  The premise of someone who becomes a paranormal investigator because of a typo in a newspaper advert is excellent, as is the idea of the central character Tempest Danger Michaels (apparently, his middle name really is danger) not believing in the paranormal - so, in effect, his job is to be a PI showing what's really happening in paranormal cases, only to be faced with what appears to be a real vampire.
  
  So far, so good - even if things are stretched a little, in that Michaels starts to investigate the vampire murders without having a client, something I find hard to believe a real PI would do. And the story worked well enough to keep me reading to the end. But, to be honest, it's not particularly well-written, perhaps not entirely surprisingly as Steve Higgs has managed to produce 22 of these novels since 2017.
  
  Higgs has a tendency to over describe, telling us far too much detail about someone's garden or what Michaels had for dinner, spending a whole paragraph on why he went for a nutrious turkey mince and vegetable chilli with 'lots of avocado pear'. Apparently he never had white carbs in his house. As for Michaels himself, he feels like he was written in the 70s, not 2017 (think a Leslie Thomas character) - definitely an unreconstructed male, with a knee-jerk response to the attractiveness (or lack of it) of women and a cringe-makingly patronising attitude to old people.
  
  In fact, I did wonder if the book was actually written well before it was published with a touch of updating to include phones with cameras and the like. This is because Michaels comments on someone in his 'late sixties or early seventies' that 'I suspected he would have at least completed National Service and I was right. Like so many of his generation, he could remember the war…' If he was 70 in 2017, he would have been born after the war was too young for National Service.
  
  Mildly entertaining, but I don't think I'll be going on to book 2.
  
• 
  Lina Hansen

  This one is a severe case of hmmmmmmm? What mainly annoys me is the total waste of a clever premise, a solid voice, and a lively style that is in parts genuinely funny. I do believe the author can write (and no, that isn't a given these days when it comes to self-published books). The plot twists (are we dealing with vampires or not? also work most of the time).
  But the locker-room humour together with an abundance of misogynistic comments I thought had gone out with the ark put a serious dampener on my enjoyment. Might be, this is a book for blokes. It sounds like one. Might be, those blokes had better be ex-army types.
  Well, it also means Higgs can write some clear fight scenes, even if they went on way too long for my taste. Okay, more of the bloke-y stuff, I guess.
  However, the novel is filled with too many random incidents unrelated to the plot, and it fails to involve key characters - like PC "Hotstuff" - in a meaningful fashion. She's just there to help him get out of deep doodoo whenever he needs it.
  Motivations and objectives? Blank. Rounded characters? Blank. Progress and Development? Blank, but it isn't that sort of story.
  What REALLY irked me like no tomorrow, though - this novel was published without being ready for publication. We all make the occasional mistake. Unless an army of editors and proofreaders hacks their way through the manuscript (nobody can afford that, not even traditional publishers), there will be typos and minor errata.
  Such is life.
  But I didn't expect this text to be studded with a never-ending array of bloopers such as characters named before another character has been introduced to them. A decent copy edit would have nipped that one in the bud.
  And even if we ignore the copy edits, the proofing of this novel is A.T.R.O.C.I.O.U.S Run-on sentences, Oxford commas sometimes ignored, sometimes applied, misspelling clunkers by the dozen, sometimes so bad I had to read twice to work out what the sentence was supposed to mean. Punctuation and spelling in this novel are definitely paranormal. Seriously, I'm not one of those people who whack others because of a few mistakes (I made them myself, and I got whacked for them).
  But we're not talking a few. I can only hope that the next novels have been properly edited. Unfortunately, I won't be around to find out.
• 
  Barbara

  25% in and don't find the humor yet....which, advertised, was the draw for me. Still, forging on.
  50% Extremely juvenile, and I have had enough of his mother. I really don't want to keep going but I finish books. Full stop. Testosterone juvenile...
  Comparison to Dresden is ludicrous. Admittedly he lost me in the y-e-a-rs when Jim Butcher was "otherwise occupied,) but this is prompting me to read the series again...not to continue this one.
  I wish I could assign one and a half stars but it isn't that (one) bad if one ignores the characters' attitude toward women. I see the potential. I am glad he refreshed his knowledge of grammar too.
• 
  Mridula

  A bit boring
  
  First off I will say that the MC seemed to be a straightforward and proper goody goody guy. I really liked his relationship with and reading about his dogs Bull and Dozer. However that was about the only thing that made the character interesting.
  
  Overall, this book was a bit boring for me mostly because of the following points:
  
  1. The pacing was slow filled with detailed and somewhat repetitive descriptions of the MC's mundane daily routines. Also he is a bit weight conscious and seems to pay a lot of attention to how people physically look, which is described especially when it comes to the female characters.
  2. The female characters are mostly all either old ladies or super hot women (and one not so hot woman) who affect "Mr. Wriggly" (pet name for MC's private part) and all of them are attracted to the MC and are basically just prop pieces in the background to fill their purpose of swooning/flirting with the hero and the hero keeps on about how attractive they are and how they make *Mr. Wriggly" wriggle. Ew.
  3. All other characters are very one dimensional, I know this is a light hearted book supposed to be funny but really there is nothing light hearted or funny about how boringly shallow everyone is. Neither the dialogues are good.
  4. There wasn't much in terms of story, no twists and no surprises, pretty much a predictable book. Ending was also pretty meh.
  
  So apart from the bit about the dogs nothing else stands out for me, I mostly just skim read the book after a point as it wasn't that interesting. Its 1 star but added star for the dogs.
• 
  Cape Rust

  Dog walking, nutritional advice and named body parts…
  
  I have a feeling the author has a bunch of friends who have lavishly rated his book with many more stars that it actually deserves. This isn’t a bad book, it is well paced and has some good moments but nineteen dog walks and let the dogs in and let the dogs out a day combined with the authors love of sharing healthy eating habits (avoiding carb loaded and fattening foods) comes off a self righteous and unnecessary. He gives readers the name of his main characters boy-part and I use the juvenile naming convention because his hesitancy to use said body part goes well with his un clever descriptions of Its reaction to all of the women who are fawning over the main character. A paragraph description of why the main character drinks skim milk is a paragraph of reading I’ll never get back…
• 
  Todd

  Tempest is a former soldier who is opening a private investigation firm, but the newspaper ad mistyped as paranormal investigation. So you have a male version of Scully taking cases to disprove any supernatural leaning.
  Sort of a Mythbusters type of thing. Not great, but not bad.
• 
  The Man from DelMonte

  Depressingly Laddish. Unpleasantly so at times. Possibly written by someone that used to write for Loaded. Someone who’s read Rivers of London and thought “I can do that”.
  Problem is the prose is merely workmanlike, it doesn’t scan as smoothly as that from the pen of Mr Aaronovitch. There’s not much in the way of subtlety and it’s not funny. Not even a little bit. Not even involuntarily.
  There are irritating tics such as describing the time as 1937hrs and listing the components of the MC’s diet.
  There’s some cringeworthy dialogue such as the scene in a cafe:
  -“Anything else you feel tempted by?” she asked, clearly not meaning the cakes. “I do have unsatisfied appetites,” I replied, locking her eyes with mine.-
  With chat up like this it’s no wonder he’s not getting laid although the girls are seemingly lining up to throw themselves at him.
  Maybe not Loaded, then. Nuts, perhaps, or Zoo.
  The most convincing piece is dinner at his parents which actually feels like it might have been drawn from life up until the old schoolmate turns up. Then it descends into unfunny farce. Possibly tragedy.
  This would have received a one star rating if I hadn’t read that this was the author’s first book so some leeway is allowed.
• 
  Eva

  Zajímavý nápad, ale rozvleklý styl a otravný hrdina.
• 
  Natalie

  I'd give half a star if I could.
  
  Tempest Danger Michaels is a paranormal investigator whose stock and trade is debunking the various suspected supernatural goings on in Rochester Essex. Whether he finds any actual supernatural goings on is not for me to say in the interests of spoiler avoidance.
  
  The premise is interesting enough and I had high hopes however the main character is unlikeable in the extreme and I don't think that was the author's intent. Tempest objectifies EVERY SINGLE WOMAN he meets making commentary of their appearance and in one jarring occasion he can't even be bothered to learn a police woman's name and just refers to her as PC Hotstuff. The writing is just bafflingly awful; entire paragraphs devoted to dietary choices and what is healthy and what isn't. Lazy use of stereotypes to convey what the author actually wants to get the reader to understand. It's just a list of "character went here, character ate that".
  
  All of this to say I will not be picking up the next one.
• 
  Karen

  Had high hopes. Was disappointed. It seemed to start in the middle of the story with no points of reference. I thought this was supposed to be the first in a series. I also thought it was supposed to be humorous. I didn't find anything funny. Appears to be written by an aging teenager. Perhaps that was the target audience.
• 
  Lynn

  This just isn't my type of reading --- a bunch of dumb nonsense that didn't make much sense and I don't like vampires so...……...sorry
• 
  Tex

  Great start to a detective series where the PI advertises for Paranormal Activity believing full well that there isn’t any and somehow making a living off those who do. This one is about vampires and Bigfoot. Two little dachshund doggies are sweet companions.
• 
  Zachary

  Fun start to a series
  
  For a first book in a series, this was quite fun. Higgs did a great job of setting up a mystery and then seeing it thru to a solid conclusion. Curious to see what happens next!
• 
  Angela Beal

  Just a fun easy crime investigation read. Made all the better by the 2 dopey dachshunds.
• 
  Ziggy Nixon

  My name is Tempest Danger Michaels. You are probably thinking that I have a ridiculous name. Most people do.
  
  Ah if I only had a nickel… a mistaken advert that spelled "private investigator" as - yes, you guessed it - "paranormal investigator" leads our apparently brave (and somewhat lucky in terms of his redundancy/retirement package) protagonist down the merry lane of possibly meeting truly strange and sometimes horrible creatures of the fantasy world. Oh the wacky problems those cheap local papers can cause… which in terms of seeing them mentioned in literature always seems to be the case (yes, it's a legitimate trope by now)! Unfortunately, no amount of time-hono(u)red tropes could save this thinly veiled mystery masquerading as urban fantasy from being unevenly paced, only mildly humourous and for long portions quite dull. It was well past the halfway mark before anything even vaguely began to get me significantly interested and then only just. And that's ignoring the uncomfortable and borderline misogynistic passages that seemed to have been written by a hormonal teenage boy in need of a very cold shower...
  
  People paid me to politely point out how daft they were.
  
  But alas "Danger" IS his middle name … which by his own admission rarely if at all gets him laid, even though, again he does spend a lot of time on women's breasts, ample quantities of gratuitous sex, and obviously the gooey bits in between (additional: I never want to hear the name "Mr. Wriggly" aka "the voice in my pants" again as long as I live!). So despite the unpleasantly juvenile fascination with such things, I felt compelled at least to keep reading in the hopes that things would eventually liven up (with apologies to fans of the undead out there). Especially when Mr. Tempest "Never Trust Anyone With Two First Names" Michaels states "(I know) with utter conviction, like any sane person, that the whole paranormal world is a load of fantastic nonsense…" When someone throws that much apparent foreshadowing at us from the start, well, at very least hope springs eternal...
  
  I stared at her fantastic twin mounds of swollen flesh and my thoughts turned from crazed vampire murders to the potential future nakedness of my companion.
  
  The fact that Tempest (great name btw!) lives long enough to make it past the first bit of exposition is indeed impressive but if anything he is certainly lucky in the grand scheme of things! Particularly as we are barely into the story and he's already poo-poo'ing accounts of vampires, witches, werewolves and - yes, even in the forests of Kent - a sasquatch. If this isn't screaming then "oh man, everyone is truly and well doomed and they're all going to die if someone DOESN'T DO SOMETHING" at you by now, well, you're obviously new to this genre! However, there is a decided dearth of doing things in this book, other than a great deal of talking and googling and texting and moving about what seems to be at best a series of extremely small villages either by foot or by car. Sorry, by Porsche, mustn't get that detail wrong!
  
  My primary (and self-appointed) role as a paranormal investigator was to find the ordinary truth behind the mysteries I faced.
  
  In terms of the whole "is this book good?" part of my review, I can confirm that the prose is very smooth. Overall the book is also for the most part well-edited with some very minor punctuation and/or missing word hiccups occasionally sneaking in. It is, however, quite quite thorough in terms of describing situations, people, lawn and architectural designs, and so on. This was provided more often than not to the point of tedium, making the urge to cry out with a Pythonesque "get on with it" never far away! I mean, how much detail do readers need anyway about the decorations and such of a protagonist's parents? Or even Debbie the blind-date with the Calrissian moustache and ample though not to be criticized girth and apparent need for sex right then and there (just roughly the level of, quote, "Mrs. Potato Head auditioning for a porn movie!" Yes, more sexual innuendos for the teen boys reading at home…)? Well, to be fair, she is a lonely church-going divorced mother of four so OBVIOUSLY her loins must be feeling quite lonely! Um, what?
  
  As the bag fell away it revealed a knitting needle poking from the side of his skull with a ball of yarn hanging from it.
  
  I will say that as a non-subject of the Empire, the formulation and general structure of the book comes across as being very very oh by the gods was it ever so British. Not on the level of say a Goody / Grant tale, no no. We're talking putting Downton Abbey to shame - assuming that counts as something considered quintessentially, again, British. But good golly you have no questions left about, well, any things, place or person by the time a passage is done with any of the thems or its in question. I would call it 'dry' in terms of styling but more accurately it was beyond arid. I certainly have no desire to know anything more about this area southwest of London and south of Reading (yes, I eventually got so bored, I started googling locations) even if you paid me and provided the keys to a semi-detached house to stay in for free! Did I forget to mention I have grown to despise tea in all its incarnations and serving styles at this stage?
  
  The interior of the house looked like it had been decorated in the style of a Mogadishu slum during a particularly unpleasant fight between warring gangs.
  
  I also feel compelled to make one point quite clear: despite all the advertisements to the contrary - and goodness knows there have been more than a fair share of same on social media recently - there is nothing about this book nor the style of writing nor even the plot construction nor ESPECIALLY the humour (note spelling) that even closely resembles any of the same from Sir Terry Pratchett. Whoever thought this would be a good way to push these books to the public has done not only the readers but also Mr. Higgs a great disservice, as this is not only very misleading but definitely elicited more than a touch of frustration on my part. Again, I considered this to be a professionally delivered, well-written book, even though it wound up not being to my liking. But trying to shelve it with the Discworld series is folly at best and wound up actually distracting me during my reading experience. I kept thinking, "welp, surely we'll see something like that soon, no?" No. And I beg you: do NOT get me started on that ridiculously over-the-top and irrelevant cover…
  
  I want to spend some time in your head. You could sell tickets every Halloween and never run out of customers.
  
  And as such, I give this book a very tenuous 3 stars… and would probably also insist on putting up a sign warning of the potential danger that it might fall into the 2 star realm at any moment, particularly if you're out at night trying to navigate a poorly lit trail running alongside a canal (just a random thought that). At the end of the day, my main question remains simply: "Do I want to continue reading other offers from this rather extensive series?" To that, I'm afraid that my answer must be "no" at this stage. Well, let's go with "never say never but definitely no time soon!" I found this first chapter in the series to be at best a rather dull and overly stretched out treatise on too many loose themes to really enjoy it, all of which was underlined by an unexciting, predictable and definitively anti-climatic ending (though I am happy we respected the rule about never ever killing cute pets). Admittedly, I can see where some fans may consider this book and maybe even the other 21 (really?) books that follow to be the height of urban fantasy... even though again I would counter-argue, even perhaps vehemently so, that this was a mystery tale only posing as urban fantasy. I was as mentioned disinterested for large swaths of this tale, where I struggled mightily to reach the end and debated making it a DNF at several points.
  
  The book was slated by the critic in the local paper though, cited as being poorly written, confusing and boring.
  
  In conclusion, if I compare this to any number of other writers work that would be listed in a similar vein by distributors everywhere (incl. Gualtieri, Tullbane, Burtness, Nader, etc.), I personally would not allow into the same clubhouse for - yuck - tea and biscuits. "Oh well, it happens" would be my concluding reaction. I hope that your own experience is more positive! Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I feel much better now...
• 
  Ivlia Blackburn

  A lovely change to read a book which is based on investigating paranormal affairs but the investigator doesn't believe in the paranormal. And everything to date has backed up and proved his initial beliefs to be correct.
  Now there seems to be a serial killer in this corner of Kent who is killing by biting the throats of the victims leaving them to die from blood loss. Then the local version of big foot or sasquatch is apparently seen in the area by a number of people. Then the creature appears in front of a passing car causing it to crash and killing the driver.
  Tempest Danger Michaels is asked to investigate both cases. The first by a serving police officer who has little faith in her comrades solving the case, has a problem with the main investigating officer and hopes to not only put one over the officer but also to be promoted to trainee detective. In the second case the mother of the passenger in the crashed car wants to know who, or what, caused the car to crash. Not to gain retribution for the dead man but for her daughter who was a passenger in the car and, because she is a model, her career has been destroyed by the injuries she received in the crash. Her mother intends to sue the person who caused the crash and ran off without checking on the occupants or calling for help.
  Full of humour, snippets of interesting information and a cracking storyline Tempest Michaels and his associates (Big Ben, Jagjit and Constable Amanda Harper) solve both cases and provide a lot of enjoyment along the way.
  Every bit as good, actually better, than the Patricia Fisher series, the Blue Moon Investigations books are now all sitting on my Kindle waiting for me to read them all. I can't wait.
• 
  Barbara

  I'm not sure why I found this such a page turner as, in hindsight, the writing is quite clunky. However, I did enjoy it. I found the mystery interesting and at times it was laugh out loud funny.
  
  I liked that the main character was not a Gary Stu - except for the implausibly large number of women who fancied him. In fact, at times he was a bit of a dick.
  
  My biggest objection was the amount of matter of fact details that were included but did not seem to add to the plot. As an example, when he visits his parents, we aren't just told he parked out front but that he locked his car door using the remote control. Why did I need to know that? I could understand if the author went on to say he took those few extra seconds to avoid going inside, or he knew it wasn't necessary but did it any way because he knew he was over-protective about his car or just that it was necessary because of the dodgy neighbourhood they lived in. Something to explain why telling me he locked his car added something to the story/character/setting. But no. In fact, we got to learn a lot about his diet, exercise habits and clothing brand choices for no reason I could see. I think about 1/3 of the story could have been trimmed without loss and it would have tightened the pace.
  
  Still, I bought the first 5 books as a bundle and will happily read the next 4.
• 
  Jay Sprenkle

  I wanted to like this book. It has the makings of a decent series. Tempest solves mysteries the gullible want to label as "paranormal." They're not, so it's an interesting spin on the trope.
  
  Instead of finding a likeable series I learned a valuable lesson for an author. If you give your main character a flaw be careful. You may also give your readers a reason to detest him, and stop reading your books.
  
  Here's where Steve lost this reader:
  Tempest complains about his lack of success with women. A lot.
  He's made a date with a woman who expressed interest in him.
  He forgets about the date and stands her up.
  Three times.
  
  After three times Tempest isn't flawed. He's a d**k.
  I have no sympathy, or interest, in reading further.