The premise turns on the unstated incongruity of the "cozy mystery." The fact is, unless you are a police detective or a private investigator, most ordinary individuals don't encounter dead bodies very often. But in cozy mystery series, readers have to accept that amateur sleuths keep stumbling over corpses every time they turn around.

Kate Jasper, the heroine of 10 mysteries, owns a Southern California gag gift business. But she bemoans the fact that "every time I walk into a room filled with people, someone drops dead." Reluctantly, Kate takes the advice of her best friend Barbara and visits a psychic circle to see if someone can determine why she has become "The Typhoid Mary of Murder."

But instead of exploring this sly piece of irony, the story degenerates into a poorly executed cozy mystery. Sure enough, during the psychic circle, someone winds up dead. Unfortunately, the author doesn't take any time to set up the victim or the suspects so the reader doesn't know or care much about either. Barbara, along with a police detective who is into alternative methods of investigating, utilize the services of a psychic artist, a dowser, Kate's cat, and a variety of New Age psychobabble such as "anger meridians" and "enneagrams" to figure out the mystery while Kate rolls her eyes and acts skeptical.

Of course none of their methods yield anything, and Kate and Barbara rely on the tried-and-true method of visiting each suspect in turn and asking if they know anything about the murder. Brilliant. Of course, when they figure out the identity of the murderer, they confront the individual without any protection and are threatened at gunpoint. This just happens to be my Mystery Reader pet peeve – allegedly intelligent heroines who insist on facing the murderer without weapons or police presence because they naively think they're not in danger.

There's a lame subplot involving Kate's ex-husband, who wants to reconcile. The best character in the series, Kate's laconic but lovable hulk of a boyfriend Wayne, is recovering from pneumonia and is unfortunately reduced to a cameo role.

Kate's initial quest to find out why she attracts dead bodies is never addressed, wasting the only interesting plot of the novel. If you think New Age beliefs and props are hysterically funny, you might get a chuckle out of Murder on the Astral Plane. But, if like myself, you're looking for a satisfying, challenging and interesting murder mystery, this book will only annoy you.

--Susan Scribner