The Ghost and the Dead Deb

I wouldn’t make book on that, sweetheart.

“On what?”

On some hoity-toity chef leaving the bright lights of his big city restaurant job for this little podunk burg.

“Quindicott is a charming and quaint little town, Jack Shepard. Repeat after me. Quaint is good.”

Baby, the only good thing about this town is you.

I was unwrapping a new CD when the words sunk in. I completely froze, unable to believe my ears. “Jack? Did you just go sappy on me?”

Yeah, honey. Savor it while you can.

“You know, Jack, seriously . . . I never asked you: What did you think of my work . . . as a P.I.?”

Not bad. For a dame.

I smiled. “Thanks.”

But you’ve got a helluva long road to travel, sister, so don’t let it go to your head.

“I won’t. But I’ll tell you what, I’m pretty sure this will.”

I pulled a bottle of chilled champagne out of my tote bag. A minute later, I was popping and pouring the bubbly into a shallow glass—okay so it was a cheap plastic party glass and not fluted crystal, but the champagne was real.

Finally learning how to let your troubles make a getaway, I see.

I smiled and hit the play button on the new CD player. “And here’s a little something for you.”

What’s that?

He didn’t have to ask twice. The CD of Glenn Miller’s greatest hits immediately began to fill the room with 1940s’ big band classics, starting with that haunting standard, “Moonlight Serenade.”

Hey, that’s the tune somebody played the night we braced Joey Lubrano.

“Aw, Jack, you remembered. How romantic.”

He laughed and so did I. Then I leaned back on my bed, closed my eyes, and sipped champagne. After two hours, I had (mostly) forgotten how bad I felt about Angel Stark and Victoria Banks and today’s sentencing of Hal McConnell. I had finally learned how to relax with my ghost. I was so relaxed, in fact, I began drifting off and almost didn’t hear Jack talk to me one last time.

I’ll see you in your dreams, baby, he whispered. Then I felt the cool kiss of his presence temporarily recede, back into the fieldstone walls that had become his tomb.

Don’t Miss the Next Haunted Bookshop Mystery

The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library

Hard-boiled private eye Jack Shepard didn’t have much use for books—at least, not when he was alive. Scholarly tomes never helped him persuade a clammed-up booze-hound to spill, nail a fakeloo grifter, or make a hatchetman grab some air until the coppers showed. So, of course, he has little interest in the crate of dusty old volumes that arrive at the Rhode Island bookshop he’s been haunting for fifty years. On the other hand, young widow Penelope, her aunt Sadie, and their book-loving friends in the Quindicott Business Owners Association (a.k.a. the Quibble Over Anything gang) are thrilled with the delivery. The rare leather-bound library of Edgar Allan Poe limited editions had been willed to Buy the Book by an elderly admirer of Sadie’s. The dead man’s library is so valuable that Pen and Sadie are immediately inundated with astronomical bids for each and every volume in the set. Everything appears rosy, until Pen and Sadie begin to sell off the books one by one . . . and one by one each buyer dies. The police don’t believe Pen’s “literary” theory—that these deaths are linked to the rare book purchases. In fact, the police don’t believe these deaths are murders at all. Pen, of course, knows differently, which means it’s time to persuade her hard-boiled haunter to stop resting in peace, start cracking some clues, and make sure this twisted Poe freak kills “nevermore.”