Category: paranormal mystery

Guest Blogger ~ Cherie Claire

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

A SCANCy series takes on Covid: Ghost Fever by Cherie Claire

            The last thing I wanted to rehash in my mystery writing was the virus that stole two years of my life. Of course, I’m exaggerating. I’m still here and am grateful my immediate family and friends are healthy and well. But write about Covid? Wasn’t high on my list.

            And yet, I had visited an outfitter in a rural area of the Florida Panhandle, just outside Pensacola, and it birthed an idea. Here was a place to zip line, kayak and relax in cabins on a piney woods property with an old schoolhouse from the 1920s and a creepy cemetery — yes, a cemetery! And it got better. Inside my cabin was a book about a rash of UFO sighting in the area in the 1970s. Nearby is a state park named for Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer who searched for the Fountain of Youth.

My imagination took off.

            The seventh book in my Viola Valentine paranormal mystery series combines all those elements, but adds time travel as well. What other pandemic had Americans been subjected to — the Spanish Influenza of 1918! That’s in the story as well.

            Ghost Fever may take place in 2021 amid the Covid scare but there’s a lot of adventure to enjoy.

The series features my main character, Viola Valentine of New Orleans. After a hurricane upends her life, Viola separates from a loveless marriage and becomes a travel writer, her dream profession. But the storm also blew open a psychic door. Now she sees ghosts who have died by water and mysteries to solve everywhere she goes.

            She’s what I call a SCANC. But it’s not what you think. SCANC stands for Specific Communication with Apparitions, Non-Entities and the Comatose. And Viola has seen all three!

The key word here is “specific.” Viola repressed her psychic abilities when she was young, tired of being chastised as having a vivid imagination when ghosts would appear. Children of the Paranormal TV show had yet to air so poor Vi had no support system, either. When my mystery series opens, Viola realizes that the trauma of the hurricane opened that door back up, but this time, the ghosts Vi sees are strictly related to water.

Along the way, that husband she tried to distance herself from won’t let her go. When I first started writing the series, I envisioned him a goofy distraction at best. He ended up stealing my heart and has become a colorful fun character throughout the series. He has some supernatural talents as well.

Do they get back together? You’ll have to read to find out.

Ghost Fever is the latest book in the Viola Valentine series, but the fun begins with A Ghost of a Chance, when Viola first discovers her ghostly talent. That ebook is free to download at all online bookstores. I also routinely give away copies of other books in the series through my newsletter. You can sign up and enter the contests at chereclaire.net.

Hopefully, Viola won’t have to experience another hurricane or pandemic, although being a New Orleans native she’s bound to see another storm or two. Vi has visited numerous Deep South locations and I’ll be sending my travel writing character to Southern destinations in future books, although an Alaska cruise is floating through my mind these days. Pun intended.

Regardless, there will be more Viola Valentine ghost stories to come.

Ghost Fever

The ghosts of the past never stop haunting.

Viola takes a job at her old summer camp in the Florida Panhandle, hoping for a peaceful place to work after months in Covid lockdown. But old traumas from her time at Camp Secret Spring resurface and Viola’s dream of a quiet getaway quickly turns into a nightmare.

Her best friend disappeared that summer, never to be found. Was it the camp’s mysterious water that Ponce de León searched for? Or can her friend’s vanishing be chalked up to the UFO sightings over the years? And just who were the Utopians who lived there before, many of whom died in the pandemic of 1918?

Book Seven in Cherie Claire’s Viola Valentine mystery series.

Book Links

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fever-Viola-Valentine-Mystery-ebook/dp/B09GMSDV1Q/

Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/ghost-fever/id1588475088

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-fever-cherie-claire/1140231054?ean=2940162354956

Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Cherie_Claire_Ghost_Fever?id=guJFEAAAQBAJ

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1107922

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/ghost-fever-2

Cherie Claire is the award-winning author of a mystery series and several Louisiana romances. New this year is Ghost Fever, part of a paranormal mystery series featuring New Orleans travel writer and ghost sleuth Viola Valentine. A native of New Orleans, Cherie now lives in Georgia where she works as a travel writer, but returns to her home state of Louisiana often. Visit her website at www.cherieclaire.net and follow her on social media.

Website: https://www.cherieclaire.net/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Cherie-Claire/e/B000APFZ6E?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1634567765&sr=8-1

Twitter: @Claire_Cherie, https://twitter.com/claire_cherie

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorcherieclaire/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cherecoen/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/cajunromances/_created/

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/cherie-claire

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cherieclaire?lang=en

Guest Blogger ~ C L Bee

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

THE GHOSTLY AND PARADISE TAXI – Book 1 in the 3 book series The Ghostly And Paradise Taxi is a mystery with no predictability, essentially a book for our time when no one knows whether they will survive another day.

From the first chapter with the heading “Remembrances of time past and present” the mystery of this cross genre Kindle eBook begins.  The unnamed  “he and she” are having a conversation, but I drop a few clues the reader can pick up when “she” indicates that finally, she’s written the first paragraph of the book she has always wanted to write.  And “he” asks whether she will use her pseudonym. Another clue for the reader to pick up comes when she asks him to read the first paragraph.  And the title of “her” book is the same as the title of this book.

The process of writing an intriguing mystery involves knowing how to plot a step by step  to parts of the puzzle.  For my book to have its twists and turns, early on in the writing, I keep a time line file in my head until I get the sense of how to move the plot and characters toward the denouement.  Sometimes I use a time line that is part of the chapter heading.  I want flawed characters to write about, because I am offering the reader a view of humanity, and as we know, no one is perfect.  In writing the book I’d like to read, I have to plot a way to move my characters toward a life changing experience, in other words, their epiphany, but some of us never learn, and those are the characters I want to receive a punishment apropos to their malicious intent. 

I know readers will enjoy solving my mystery along with me when I also wonder what happens next.  For me, writing is like tending the grapes in a vineyard.  To make certain my words are conveying the story, it’s like making fine wine, I know my story ends when all the pieces complete the puzzle, then I’m ready to send my manuscript to my publisher.   For years I wrote for editors who edited writers to “put a coat of polish” on the contents of their magazine or newspaper.  I wrote a popular monthly column entitled “Travel Agent Spotlight” for a travel industry magazine, but for the two years I had written the column, I couldn’t find one word that I wrote.  I finally told the Editor that I would send her a summary.  She told me to keep handing in my copy as usual, but I had an idea for a book, and I quit. 

Now, I’d like you to read my book, here is the Amazon Kindle url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PYL8NDT?asin=B09PYL8NDT&revisionId=d39fd049&format=1&depth=1

As a bonus for the readers of Ladies of Mystery’s blog, you can read this book for free. 

My publisher is Kindle exclusive, and  Daccord Press plans to offer a free Kindle ebook promotion, the website is: 

https://www.daccordpress.com/

Use the link on the right of the Daccord Press website for the email contact, but if you are reading this blog, here it is:  mailto:daccordpress@yahoo.com  Ask to be on the email list and leave your email contact.  Daccord Press will send out an email to you with the “day” or “days” you can take advantage of this offer, all you have to do is put the url of the book:  

Claim your free Kindle ebook, if you don’t have a Kindle, download to your computer.

CL Bee is a former freelance writer who worked overseas and was based in Paris, France. Now she’s back in the USA and writing the fiction she didn’t publish during those years when she was freelancing.  CL Bee is currently at work on her first eBook, The Ghostly and Paradise Taxi Book 1, in the series The Ghostly and Paradise Taxi, published by Daccord Press, an indie small press.

Guest Blogger ~ Sharon L. Dean

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

(Re)appearing Ladies

It’s Halloween. What better time to write about ghosts, real and imagined. I spent my academic career writing about the nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. Woolson had her own family ghost story to tell about the haunting of the bedroom where her sister Emma died. A scholar I know claims she felt Woolson’s presence when she visited the apartment where Woolson leapt or fell to her death in Venice.

 I  felt no such presence there, but like so many scholars I know, once Woolson gets hold of us, we can’t let her go. She materialized for me in my second novel, Death of the Keynote Speaker, where I imagined her as a fictionalized Abigail Brewster in a setting on one of the Isles of Shoals off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. Woolson never visited those islands, but I drew on real life historical figures for an appearance in that novel: Celia Thaxter, who held a literary salon on Appledore Island; Karen and  Anethe Christensen who were murdered on Smuttynose Island in 1873; and abortionist Madame Restell, who was known as “The Wickedest Woman in New York.”

            After I published Death of the Keynote Speaker, I wasn’t finished with my ghosts. My newest novel, The Wicked Bible, reimagines Abigail Brewster and Madame Restell. How could I not reprise “The Wickedest Woman in New York” in a novel titled after an actual 1631 Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible?”

            I’m not done with reappearances. The novel I’m working on now reprised a character I named Connie in Leaving Freedom. Woolson left her childhood home in Cleveland to accompany her mother to Florida and the beginnings of a writing career. My Connie also leaves her hometown in Freedom, Massachusetts, to care for her mother in Florida where she also finds success as a writer. My novel in progress is bringing Connie, now eighty years old, back to Freedom. It’s tentatively titled Finding Freedom. I don’t know yet what Connie will find, but I know that the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson has given me plenty of inspiration. I wonder what ghosts live for you, whether they be haunting or inspirational?

After a winter when she solved the cold case of a high school friend found dead in a barn, Deborah Strong needs a distraction. She joins a conference, “Libraries: Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?” that will be useful for her work as a librarian in the small town of Shelby. The setting at a picturesque college in New Hampshire should also be healing.

Deborah’s project for the week plunges her into a mystery that would delight most researchers. What are the connections between a Bible dubbed “The Wicked Bible,” a woman called “The Wickedest Woman in New York,” a book written by a nineteenth-century author, and a letter penned to the author? As she slowly unravels the connections, Deborah confronts an event from her own past and anticipates a future that could be as brilliant as New Hampshire’s September foliage.

Buy links: Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Bible-Deborah-Strong-Mystery/dp/1645992810

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/new/59432097-the-wicked-bible

Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. Although she has given up writing scholarly books that require footnotes, she incorporates much of her academic research as background in her mysteries. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. Her new seriesfeatures librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong. In The Barn, Deborah solves a thirty-year-old cold case. The Wicked Bible, scheduled for an October 2021 release by Encircle Publications,brings Deborah to a college campus and a search for who stole a Bible and a letter from the library’s archives. The third in the series, Calderwood Cove, forthcoming in 2022, will bring her to the coast of Maine and a murder. She continues to write and research in the landscape she’s discovering the Northwest.

Social Media:

Website: https://sharonldean.com/ Publisher: https://encirclepub.com/

Guest Blogger ~ Randy Overbeck

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

“An accomplished work of haunting mystery fiction fans of the genre won’t want to miss.”—ReadersFavorite.com

A mystery is a mystery is a mystery—not.

Readers who enjoy solving a whodunnit with their fiction can chose a cozy, a hard-boiled detective mystery, a police procedural, a noir mystery or even a historical mystery.

They each have their own conventions, required elements and fans. But they all have in common one thing …a body, often on the first page, almost always within the first chapter. Readers of these sub-genres will usually meet the victim—sometimes a nice, unwitting fellow, sometimes a despicable character even a mother couldn’t love—within the first few pages and learn about them, often with a nice dash of back story thrown in. Just before the victim, well, becomes the victim.

Then the reader spends the remainder of the novel trying to unravel the puzzle as they encounter character after character, searching each for motive, means and opportunity, dodging red herrings to try to arrive at the culprit, hopefully right before the great reveal by the author.

It’s how it’s done, it’s expected. For all the types of mystery—except mine.

Like the other types, my Haunted Shores Mysteries are classic whodunits, with the parade of possible bad guys (and girls), turns down wrong alleys, and a meticulous shifting through clues—though all these are harder to navigate because each is a cold case murder, the deed occurring years earlier.

But the aspect that sets my narratives apart from these other mysteries is the victim. Oh, Darrell—and the reader—encounters the victim in the first few pages, but he has no idea who the victim is. And it’s not a simple case of mistaken identity. You see, when Darrell first stumbles onto the victim—or more likely he/she runs into him—he/she is a ghost.

And his or her death has been covered up so as to not look like murder. The challenge for Darrell—and the reader, I hope—is to sift through clues together to first learn who the victim really was, then determine how he/she died, then try to unravel the clues that lead to the murderer. It’s a complicated process fraught with peril.

In CRIMSON AT CAPE MAY, the newest novel in the series, a tall, injured female chases Darrell down the street of Cape May—all in the first few pages. He has no idea who she is, why she is following him or that she is a victim. Until she reveals she is a ghost and pleads for his help. Even when he finally decides to help this poor woman find justice, he has no idea who she is, how she really died, much less who could be possible suspects for the murder. A tall mountain to climb.

If you’re a mystery lover who enjoys solving a complicated puzzle, check out CRIMSON AT CAPE MAY (or the other #1 best selling entry in the series, BLOOD ON THE CHESAPEAKE). See if you can get to the top of the proverbial mountain before Darrell. I’ll guarantee it will be fun trying.

No matter how far you run, you can never really escape a haunted past.

Darrell Henshaw—teacher, coach, and paranormal sensitive—learned this lesson the hard way. With his job gone and few options, he heads for Cape May to coach a summer football camp. The resort town, with gorgeous beaches, rich history and famous Victorian mansions, might just be the getaway he needs. Only, no one told him Cape May is the most haunted seaport on the East Coast. One resident ghost, the Haunted Bride, stalks Darrell, begging for his help.

He can’t refuse. 

Joining forces with Cassie, a street-wise teen and another sensitive, he investigates the bride’s death and discovers her murder is connected to a far greater horror. But can Darrell and Cassie expose those behind the crimes before they end up being the killer’s next victims? 


Incredible sale on the entire Haunted Shores Mysteries series! 

BLOOD ON THE CHESAPEAKE-$.99, CRIMSON AT CAPE MAY–$1.99, SCARLET AT CRYSTAL RIVER (pre-publication price)—$2.99.

Purchase links:

https://www.amazon.com/Crimson-Cape-Haunted-Shores-Mysteries/dp/1509231633

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/crimson-at-cape-may-randy-overbeck/1137088608?ean=9781509231638

https://www.bookbub.com/books/crimson-at-cape-may-by-randy-overbeck

Dr. Randy Overbeck is an award-winning educator, author and speaker. As an educator, he served children for more than three decades in a range of roles captured in his novels, from teacher and coach to principal and superintendent. His thriller, Leave No Child Behind (2012) and his recent mysteries, the Amazon and B & N No. 1 Best Seller, Blood on the Chesapeake and Crimson at Cape May have earned five star reviews and garnered national awards including “Thriller of the Year–ReadersFavorite.com, “Gold Award”—Literary Titan, “Mystery of the Year”—ReadersView.com and “Crowned Heart of Excellence”—InD’Tale Magazine. As a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Dr. Overbeck is an active member of the literary community, contributing to a writers’ critique group, serving as a mentor to emerging writers and participating in writing conferences such as Sleuthfest, Killer Nashville and the Midwest Writers Workshop. When he’s not writing or researching his next exciting novel or sharing his presentation “Things Still Go Bump in the Night,” he’s spending time with his incredible family of wife, three children (and their spouses) and seven wonderful grandchildren.

BOOK TRAILER—CRIMSON AT CAPE MAY

Randy Overbeck

randyoverbeck@authorrandyoverbeck.com

www.authorrandyoverbeck.com

@OverbeckRandy

FB: Author Randy Overbeck

Expanding my Horizons by Paty Jager

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

“You can’t make everyone happy.” One of my least favorite sayings but so true.

I took two trips last year that were experiences I’d never had before. I finally saw a tropical island for myself and I traveled to another country by myself – Iceland. I loved the trips and wanted to use what I experienced to write books with my characters enjoying the same places.

I set Abstract Casualty in the Shandra Higheagle series in Kaua’i Hawaii. I had a great time reliving my time there while writing the book. And the fun I had finding a way to get my character to the island in a realistic manner. Some readers loved it and the new experience, others wrote to me and wanted Shandra back in her fictional county in Idaho. They missed the secondary characters they’d come to know.

For those readers who love going back to the same place, Capricious Demise is set back in Weippe County, my fictional county in Idaho. I finished the first draft and will be releasing it in July.

This month, June 1st, the 5th Gabriel Hawke Novel, Fox Goes Hunting, released. My critique partners, beta-readers, and proof reader, loved it! I already received one 2 star review. The reader didn’t like that Hawke wasn’t tracking as much and they couldn’t pronounce the names of the characters. This book is set in Iceland.

I loved bringing things into the book that I saw and learned while in Iceland. I hope to capture a broader range of reader by going “International”. Yes, there are typical Icelandic names for characters from there. It is also set during an international Search and Rescue conference so I had secondary characters from around the world.

Yes, both books set in real places took twice as long to write. I had to make sure distances, towns, places were correct. I wanted to make sure I gave a clear picture of where they went and what they saw.

When I write the Shandra books set in a fictional place, I can make things up as I go, though I did make a map of the county when I started writing the series, so I do keep things in the same place every book. But if I want to add a business, I find a block that I didn’t put a business in already and add it.

The Hawke books are set in a real place, but I made up fake towns in place of the real ones to keep anyone I might have grown up with in that county to think I am talking about them. 😉

While I know there are some readers who don’t like the unexpected, I believe writing outside of my comfort zone and incorporating other places and cultures into my writing helps me grow as an individual and hopefully gives my readers a glimpse at a culture they might not get a chance to experience first hand.