Women’s Club Manager, Amateur Detective, Reluctant Medium

I never thought it would be simple to run the business side of a grand women’s club in an old mansion. Scheduling activities from card games to book discussions, handling the restaurant open to members and their guests, grappling with the fact that these days, women’s clubs are dinosaurs and membership rolls are plummeting. Who has time for leisurely meetings with friends to put together puzzles or listen to poetry readings?

But here’s the thing about me and the reason I accepted the job–I love a challenge.

The bigger the better. The more complicated, the more I dig right in. The more baffling . . .

Well, there were a couple of challenges I wasn’t counting on when I signed on to work at Portage Path Women’s Club.

The murder of the club president, for one thing. It is an accepted fact that no one in the club and hardly anyone outside it liked Muriel Sadler. That doesn’t mean the poor women should have been killed in our Marigold room where we store historic documents, does it? It doesn’t mean her body needed to be tossed down the basement steps.

And it absolutely doesn’t mean that thanks to a directive from the PPWC board, I’m suddenly some sort of detective, charged with the task of getting to the bottom of Muriel’s murder.

Me? Conducting an investigation?

Okay, all right, I’m pretty good at research, and not reluctant to ask questions. I don’t back down from even the stickiest problems.

Except the murder of our not-so-beloved president comes with a slight complication–the ghost of a flapper.

Yes, believe me, I know. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. But see, I grew up in the little village of Lily Dale, New York, the largest Spiritualist community in the country. I’m used to people (including my aunt Rosemary) talking to the dead.

I’ve just always been pretty sure I wasn’t one of those people.

Now, here I am, facing not only the snarls of a murder investigation, but having to deal with Clemmie Bow, a young singer who nearly one hundred years ago, was killed in the basement speakeasy of the mansion.

Throw in a fire at the club, a cute detective assigned to the case, and a mansion filled with suspects and you’ll see, a day in my life can be ghastly and ghostly!

Haunted Homicide is the first book in the NEW “Haunted Mansion” cozy mystery series, released September 29, 2020.

Avery Morgan has been hired to breathe new life into the Portage Path Women’s Club, but first she’ll have to deal with a dead body and a meddling ghost.

Avery Morgan has had a harrowing first week on the job as manager of the Portage Path Woman’s Club. Not only is she in charge of a grand old home with a mountain of maintenance problems and scheduling nightmares–thanks to a recent fire in the Marigold meeting room–but she’s also got Muriel Sadler to deal with. Muriel is the current president of the club, the one “nay” vote when the rest of the board voted “aye” to hiring Avery.

After a morning of dealing with another one of Muriel’s snits and a meeting with the delicious and delightfully unsettling Ben Harkness, who will be handling renovations in the fire-damaged portions of the house, the last thing Avery needs is for one of the fuses to blow. Again.

She grabs her handy flashlight and heads into the basement, where she stumbles across Muriel’s body. She also stumbles across an unexpected helper, Clemmie Bow, the ghost of a young woman who was accidentally killed in the building almost a hundred years ago.

Together Clemmie and Avery are determined to solve Muriel’s murder before the killer sends Avery to join Clemmie on the other side.

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About the author
Lucy Ness is a new penname for Kylie Logan who writes the Jazz Ramsey mysteries (newest is “The Secrets of Bones”) as Kylie Logan. The Haunted Mansion mysteries give her an opportunity to get back to the paranormal roots she established when she wrote the Pepper Martin mysteries as Casey Daniels. Ness is a long-time author who loves the twists and turns of a good mystery and enjoys adding a little woo-woo to her stories. She can often be found lost in thought . . . planning her next murder!

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