2095 romance/SF/mystery novella; in the Ghost Hunters series.
Virginia Burch rented the office upstairs from Sam Gage, and now
they're merging their businesses in order to hold on to the house in
an area ripe for redevelopment. But that's not all…
And here of course there's worldbuilding that's carefully set up
to work with the story: this culture has fixed-term renewable
marriages and lifetime ones, the latter expected if you're planning to
raise a child. (It's not really clear what the fixed-term ones offer
over informal cohabitation, but that's apparently not a thing people
do any more.) Gage has proposed a fixed-term mariage blanc to reduce
the tax paid by the combined business, but Burch has fallen for him
and doesn't know how to say it…
Of course, this is combined with their ghost-hunting. And there are
shenanigans, and everyone knows ghost hunters are incurably randy
after they've dispelled a ghost. Perhaps it all feels too carefully
set up, though this may be inevitable in 25,000-odd words to cover the
progress of the relationship.
But while elements of the romance felt mechanistic, the ghost-hunting
shenanigans are rather more interesting, and there's a type of
artefact discovered here which makes sense both as what our heroes
make of it and as what it eventually turns out to be.
There's a lot of exposition here, but I like the people, and I
continue to enjoy Castle/Krentz more than I expected when I followed a
random GoodReads recommendation.