A day in my life?

Work. Dead people.

Sad, huh? Because in the real world, that list should say something like, “Work, home, social life, shopping, lunch with friends, drinks with some good-looking guy, more shopping, visits to Mom and Dad, and deciding what to wear to all of the above.”

Only this is my life, and I’ll let you in on a secret—my life and the real world don’t exactly mesh.

You see, I’m the world’s only PI to the dead.

Yeah, you heard right. I see dead people. I talk to them, too. And what’s worse? They talk to back.

And boy, do they talk!

The dead always want something, and since I’m the only one who can communicate with them, the something they want is always something they want from me. Right wrongs. Clear names. Find murderers. Blah, blah, blah.

These days, the gone-but-not-really ghost spooking me is none other than Eliot Ness. I know you know who he is from The Untouchables, but did you know . . . after he left Chicago, he came to here to Cleveland and was Safety Director. He died somewhere in Pennsylvania and back in 1997, his ashes were brought here to the North Coast and sprinkled on the pond in the cemetery where I work.

Or at least that’s what everyone thought.

Ness says otherwise and let’s face, he’s the guy who should know. So, he shows up and tells me he wants me to do a little breaking and entering to retrieve those ashes and that sounds simple enough. Yeah, right. It would have been if the ashes were where they were supposed to be.

And if I didn’t find a dead body instead.

If all that wasn’t crazy enough, this mysterious package was delivered to me by some guy in a big, old-fashioned car, and since then, everyone in my life is acting crazy. I mean, crazier than usual.

Ella, my boss, tried to run me down with her car at the Ness memorial in the cemetery.

Quinn, my cop boyfriend, is suddenly playing the banjo.

And my mother . . . ah, my mother. She’s been so busy planning my wedding (even though I’m not officially engaged yet), she hasn’t had much time to think about anything else. That is, until she tried to kill me.

A day in my life?

That sound you hear is me sighing.

Dull? That’s one thing a day in my life never is.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT is the 10th book in the Pepper Martin paranormal mystery series published by Severn House Publishers, January 2017.

Pepper Martin returns in a new ghostly mystery when she is contacted by the ghosts of Eliot Ness and Al Capone . . .

Pepper Martin, now Community Relations Director of Garden View Cemetery, is contacted by the ghost of Eliot Ness, one of Cleveland’s most famous dearly departed. According to Ness, the ashes scattered at the ceremony twenty years earlier weren’t his. His were stolen prior to the ceremony by a Ness groupie, and he cannot rest until those ashes are found. Luckily, Pepper has an idea where they may be.

Knowing she’ll have no peace until she does what the ghost wants, Pepper travels across town to retrieve the ashes. When she gets there, though, she finds more – and less – than she bargained for. There is a dead body in the house . . . and Eliot Ness’s ashes have vanished.

Pepper sets out to solve the murder of the man in the house where the ashes were supposed to be. But when a mysterious package arrives for Pepper, containing the spirit of Al Capone, and her boyfriend Quinn begins acting strange, things go from bad to worse . . .

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About the author
Casey Daniels is the bestselling author of 10 Pepper Martin mysteries. Her newest is Graveyard Shift, set to hit store shelves on January 1. Pepper works at a historic cemetery in Cleveland solves mysteries for the ghosts there. While she doesn’t claim to have contacted any ghosts, Casey loves to explore cemeteries, the older, the better. When she’s not doing that, she’s writing as her alter-ego, nationally bestselling author Kylie Logan, whose next book in the League of Literary Ladies series is Gone With the Twins, due out in March. Casey will exploring more history this coming May when her first historical mystery, Miss Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid Murders is published. You can find her at www.caseydaniels.com and www.kylielogan.com.

All comments are welcomed.