Paint store owner Laura Meehan must prove her amateur sleuthing skills (again!) when her small town’s public library starts burning in this installment of the Haunted Paint Store cozy mystery series.Don’t mess with a paint store owner’s safe haven!
Laura Meehan has her hands full with her paint store, but also with another case (that she will definitely leave to the police to solve)! The Sea Breeze Public Library is burning and it’s clear from the beginning that it must be arson.
Who would want to burn a library down and why? Was it a group of moms protesting what they see as inappropriate book content? Maybe it was someone who didn’t like a title they lent? Or is there something more alarming going on?
As a library volunteer, Laura simply has to find out, and together with her IT-savvy husband Roy and her ex-detective father’s ghost (real or imagined still yet to be determined), she stumbles upon a lot of obstacles on her quest to find the truth—and maybe even an arsonist who might strike again!
A light-hearted cozy mystery with a paranormal twist and Copperman’s signature wit, humor, and zaniness. Perfect for fans of Copperman’s Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries and Cleo Coyle’s Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, as well as funny and cozy mysteries by Janet Evanovich, Elle Cosimano, and Amanda Flower.
I have written, now, 13 books that feature characters who are ghosts. (That’s 10 in the Haunted Guesthouse series, two in the Haunted Paint Store series, and one more in the Paint Store series that won’t come out until next year.) So one of the questions I’m most often asked by readers and on panels is: Do you, personally, believe in ghosts?
My answer is always the same, and I say it with complete conviction: I’m not going to tell you.
It’s a double-sided sword for people who write ghost stories, particularly the light-hearted mysteries with which I make my living (I’m not going to scare anybody). If I answer the question by saying that I believe the spirits of the dead live on and can be communicated with here on Earth, some readers will believe that I am a strange person who has, at best, a slippery grip on reality. But if I say I absolutely don’t believe in ghosts, many of my readers, particularly the ones who hold that belief, will consider me a traitor.
So good luck getting a straight answer out of me on the subject.
There’s a certain wish-fulfillment aspect to the whole ghost issue: If we believe that there is existence after death and that we can still communicate with friends and family, we can take a lot of the dread out of the end of life. And what evidence people point to in trying to prove they’ve had supernatural experiences ranges from the pretty convincing to the you’ve-gotta-be-kidding. There’s a whole spectrum of responses. I choose not to publicly state where I stand on the issue.
But I will tell you one thing about how I write ghosts, as I do in Where There’s Smoke, the second book in the Haunted Paint Store mystery series: I think that ghosts, if they do exist and we can communicate with them, are going to be annoying.
In the Haunted Guesthouse series, the two resident ghosts, Paul and Maxie, were stuck in the house against their will and would badger the current owner, Alison Kirby, about things going on in the house or about things that had to do with their in-the-past lives. She was trying to run a guesthouse on the Jersey Shore and raise her daughter, so she already had a lot to do. She didn’t need two dead people adding to her workload.
With the Haunted Paint Store books, the situation is a little different. Laura Meehan sees and hears only one ghost, her recently-deceased father Amos. He (was) a retired police detective who bought a paint store, which Laura is now running. And he has ideas about both the business and the investigations she finds herself enmeshed in, ideas that he does not feel compelled to keep to himself. Laura, not long after seeing his ghost, began psychotherapy sessions with a woman she calls Abby the Analyst, and she’s trying to determine whether she’s being driven crazy by a real ghost or a figment of her imagination.
In the course of Where There’s Smoke, when Laura is trying to find out who set fire to the local library, she asks her dead father for help, and gets a lot of cop speak about how to interrogate suspects. Which would be fine, if she had any suspects. Amos is bored, since he hasn’t been able to leave the paint store in months, and will keep rattling on about the case. Laura wants to solve it, and to find out where the missing librarian might be, but being lectured by your father on a daily basis can get tiring, especially when he’s dead.
I suppose my template for this presentation of dead spirits is the Topper series of films and the television program that followed them. The ghosts (originally played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, and then not) were constantly interfering with Topper’s life and inevitably getting him into trouble. Even at a very young age, when the TV show was already being shown in syndication, I thought that was how ghosts, if there were such things, would probably behave. So my ghosts are not going to be trying to frighten anyone, but they will drive you nuts.
Whether or not I think such a thing can happen outside the pages of a novel is, in my mind, irrelevant. If you believe in my ghosts, I’ve done my job. If you don’t, well, you don’t have to answer that question.
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!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?
E.J. Copperman is a figment of someone’s imagination. Sometimes E.J. writes as Jeff Cohen. Where There’s Smoke is his 36th published mystery. But he says he doesn’t write mysteries; he writes comedies that have a mystery in them. It’s up to you to decide if that’s true.
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