Something new is born with the juxtaposition of two unlikely elements. For example, what happens if you rescue a character you met in someone's book and apply romance á la The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Not the 1945 novel by R.A. Dick AKA Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie (which I never read), and not the thirty minute comedy series that aired back in 1969. No, romance is the 1947 black and white movie with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney. Romance is what happens when the widow named Lucy Muir moves into Gull Cottage, a seaside bungalow formerly owned and still occupied by Daniel Gregg, the irascible ghost-captain. What is more romantic than having your own ghost lover?

Has a character ever piqued your interest but you didn't like what happened to him in his original context? So what would happen if you rewrote him as a tortured phantom spirit and give him someone to haunt, someone who might be able to save him? Only maybe he's not exactly a ghost, and she's not exactly haunted. It is an enticing construct--the idea of the phantom lover whose spirit remains when his body is gone, a drive so strong it breaks the boundaries of reality as we know it, a need of justice that transcends space and time: these are elements of romance that emerge in Diana Hunter's release Kara's Captain.

Diana Hunter gives us Kara. Kara is a writer who gets her ideas from tombstones. Stories show up in her head, born of her imagination and eerie graveyards. Only this time her mind conjures up a character she can actually see. (Just exactly how do you recognize when your intangible hero is a vision, figment or delusion, anyway?) A ghost who calls himself Captain Walton shows up in a graveyard demanding she write his story and calls her a selfish harridan. Maybe it's not the most auspicious start, but what is romance without misunderstanding and obstacles? The path to true fiction never did run smooth. Or something like that. Like--what about Kara's good friend/ fair-weather BDSM lover Peter?

In moviespeak this plot could be pitched as Frankenstein meets the Ghost and Mrs. Muir; it would be misleading, but true as well.

Kara's Captain is a new take on the phantom lover story. Kara and Captain Walton are well-developed characters, and the plot is well written. If there's an issue, it is that the story suffers from "lack of conflict" syndrome, which is when the story comes to its most obvious conclusion without much interference. Both of the principals are strong and round enough characters that they could have withstood (maybe even deserved to withstand) a conflict worthy of their development. It's an entertaining read, if you don't mind a story with no plot twists.

Reviewed by Maîtresse
Copyright November 2006