Everyone has a soul mate somewhere, but what if yours isn’t making an appearance? Perhaps, he lives in another county, maybe even another country, or even another century. That’s the issue, facing Sara Wade in Elizabeth Sinclair’s new historical, Garden of the Moon. If you think your love life is bad, try falling for a ghost.

Sara Wade doesn’t need to be told she’s an embarrassment to her socialite mother. She knows. At the great age of twenty-seven, she’s still unmarried despite being an heiress. It could be her appalling ability to talk to ghosts. The ability didn’t get her in trouble although ghosts always wanted to use her as an errand girl. Her mistake was mentioning it to someone outside the family. Suddenly, she became a bit odd and not a good marriage prospect. Her inheritance from her grandmother couldn’t have come at a better time. It offered a chance to disappear from public view and a reprieve from the judgmental eye of her mother.

Harrogate Plantation looks forgotten. The gardens choked with weeds, while the house dry rotted. Still, Sara could see it was beautiful once. Sara remembers visiting her grandmother when the plantation was in its glory. Her grandmother loved to sit in a little garden she referred to as her husband constructed for her called the moon garden.

Sara enters the house unaware of what a stir she causes in the spirit world. A found diary reveals the ill-fated love affair between Maddy and Jonathan. Sara finds herself so caught up in the journal that she journeys back in time and actually meets Jonathan. It isn’t hard to understand why Maddy fell so hard for this charismatic man because Sara is falling herself. Unfortunately, Katherine, a malevolent spirit, wants Jonathan for her own and will do anything to get rid of Sara.

In The Garden of the Moon, Sara is a fully rounded character who is rather independent for the time. She even decides to a spinster as opposed to entering a loveless sham of a marriage. Sara’s ghostly lover, Jonathan, tends to be less well rounded. Being a ghost might tend to do that to you. Her friend Julie serves as a voice of reason as Sara is pulled between the past and the present.

The Garden of the Moon is a historical romance that employs many gothic elements. If you like your romances with southern charm, mystery and ghosts, this is the book for you.