From the Riley Locke desk
Ashley Poston earns her second seat on our lists with the highest-concept grump in the catalogue, and the desk will state the premise plainly because the marketing already has: Florence Day, professional ghostwriter for romance's biggest name, has stopped believing in love and started missing deadlines — and when a new editor rejects her extension request, then dies before the week is out, he arrives at her door. As a ghost. He is standing in the hallway, tie still perfect, entirely unaware of the schedule change. The Dead Romantics is a romcom about grief conducted with an actual ghost, and the desk considers it the boldest tonal wire-walk on the grumpy shelf: one wrong step from either whimsy or misery, and Poston never falls.
Florence's gift is the family business. The Days run a funeral home in a small Southern town, her father its beloved director, and Florence — who has seen ghosts since childhood — fled both the town and the talent a decade ago after the gift made her briefly, cruelly famous in the way small towns manage. The book brings her home for the reason these books must, a loss in the family, disclosed early and carried throughout, that returns her to the funeral home's rhythms with her editor's ghost in tow. Benji Andor, the ghost in question, is the desk's favourite kind of grump, a man whose sternness was always deadline-shaped rather than soul-shaped, and death has left him with nothing to edit except, gradually, Florence's conviction that romance is a lie she types for money.
What the desk admires is the argument the book stages between its genres. The funeral-home chapters are honest about death's logistics, casseroles and cosmetics and all; the romance chapters insist on wanting anyway; and the novel's thesis, that love stories are how the living file their dead, lands with the weight of a family trade. As for what a romance between a woman and a ghost can possibly resolve to, the desk confirms an answer exists, that the plotting plays fair, and that the answer is earned, and we will be saying nothing else in this hallway.
Honest notices: content guidance for parental loss and grief, central and tender; the ghost mechanics run on feeling. Heat is warm and necessarily patient.
Who is this for? Grievers who need permission to laugh, romcom readers ready for cargo, and everyone who suspects the love stories were always about the leaving. Answer the door. The desk did, and wept usefully, and has since pressed the book on three grieving friends with full instructions. Poston's catalogue pairs this with her time-slip apartment elsewhere on our shelves. She has a whole practice in impossible tenderness. Book both appointments.