I’m not crazy. Probably.
Believe me, until very recently I was living a completely normal life. I have a wonderful husband named Roy who is as supportive a man as I have ever met. I had – past tense – a steady job as a legal assistant at a well-established law firm in Maryland. I was cruising along and ahead, without much planning for the future. The future would take care of itself.
And then my father got sick.
Dad, whose name was Amos Meehan, named me Laura because of a sitcom character he had a crush on when he was young. My mother is somewhat… unreliable at times, and that meant Dad and I were very close because we mostly just had each other. So when he was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer a few months ago, my world was spun into chaos.
I took a leave of absence from the firm and moved back to the town where I grew up, Sea Breeze, New Jersey, right on the Southern end of the Jersey shore. I was staying at Dad’s house for a few weeks, and then he passed away in the hospital, peacefully but not without pain.
I was devastated and pushed myself into an almost entirely different life. I kept my husband because I’m not an idiot, but I quit the job at the law firm and decided to take the inheritance my father had left me – his paint and wallpaper store – and keep running it to maintain the family’s presence in the business and the community.
All of which would have been fine except for two things: 1. I had no idea how to run a store, since my only previous experience had been “helping” Dad there after school a few days each week until I graduated high school. 2. Once I reopened Breezeway Paint and Wallpaper, I started to see Dad’s… ghost(?) hanging out in the store. Every day.
And then I came into the store one morning and found one of my regular customers dangling off the paint shaking machine. So, okay. Three things.
I figured the spirit or apparition or whatever was a figment of my imagination and would resolve itself in a day or two. But my father had been a police detective before he bought the paint store, and he wanted to advise me on how to solve the murder. Like that was any of my business. I have an arrangement with the police department: They don’t sell paint and I don’t solve murders.
But this was a very persistent hallucination, and before I knew it I was hip-deep in suspects, clues and the occasional visit from the actual cops. And the more I found out the more I was convinced the killer had chosen my store for a reason, which I don’t know. That doesn’t help me sleep at night.
On the plus side, I just started therapy, so maybe I can clear my mind and get my father to go be dead like he’s supposed to.
But is that what I really want?
ALL SPOOKED UP — A “Haunted Paint Store” Mystery, Book 1
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release: November 2025
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Amazon | Barnes and Noble
Paint store owner Laura Meehan makes the discovery of a lifetime in her shop when she stumbles upon a body and . . . her dead father’s ghost! This brand-new Haunted Paint Store Mystery has Copperman’s signature wit, humor, and zaniness aplenty!
Dealing with her father’s recent death, Laura Meehan decides to move back to her New Jersey hometown and take over the paint and wallpaper store he opened after quitting his straining job in the police. Knowing that she is uprooting her own and her supportive husband Roy’s lives, she’s determined to continue her father’s legacy and keep the business alive.
But that doesn’t seem to be the only thing alive when Laura discovers that her store is haunted by none other than her deceased father! Either that or Laura has finally lost her mind and developed Ghost Traumatic Stress Syndrome . . .
When she discovers the body of the town’s deadbeat painter Ernie on top of all that, Laura is determined to find the culprit who’s rudely used her store as their murder scene, with the help of her ex-police detective father’s ghost—real or not, Laura might as well make use of his expertise!
It turns out Ernie owed a lot of money to a lot of people. Could one of them have reached breaking point and killed the freeloader?
About the author
E.J. Copperman is the author of ALL SPOOKED UP (where you can meet read about Laura Meehan), the first novel in the Haunted Paint Store series, as well as the Fran and Ken Stein (read that again) Mystery series, with SWITCHEROO released in 2025. And the first draft of the second Haunted Paint Store novel is almost ready to be massively revised. ALL SPOOKED UP was released on November 4.