The Ghost and the Dead Deb

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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.”