After a whirlwind summer, B&B proprietress and skilled cuisinier Claire Andersen is looking forward to a little R&R in her cozy renovated Victorian for the autumn—and doing a bit of seasonal leaf peeping the Appalachian region is renowned for. She’s barely even had the time to fit in a first official date with her longtime crush, dreamy handyman Ray Hamilton. But she hardly makes it to Halloween when the heartless and rather Cruella-ish Helena Delacroix invites her to host this year’s All Hallows’ Eve Haunted Hootenanny (at the eleventh hour, thank you very much).
Sensing the last-minute invitation is a cruel trap, Claire tenuously accepts. But no sooner have her costumed revelers partaken in some wholesome bobbing for apples than a skeleton winds up planted in her cupboard—the real life, fleshless kind. What at first seems a vile practical joke turns criminal when Claire discovers the remains are staged in close proximity to The Black Hand, a decades-old murderous signature commonly left behind by anti-union henchmen in Appalachian mine crime scenes.
A skeleton in my closet? thinks our heroine. You’ve got to be kidding me… But that’s not all. The ghastly episode is soon compounded by several about-town sightings of The Pink Lady, a ghost known to roam the hallways of the old Galway Inn (among other locales). Are the incidents related? Could this be a case of an embittered hotelier, a woman scorned, systematically terrorizing the patrons of her competitors? (This vampire bat, this inhuman beast.) Or is it really possible the local inns are being haunted by an angry phantom with unfinished business? If the broom fits!
…Worse yet, is the town of Galway the latest victim of a still-active chapter of an historic West Virginia-based mob? After her last mafia run-in, Claire isn’t exactly eager to battle a cohort of ruthless gangsters. But, mob connection or not, she feels compelled to roll up her sleeves, grab a shovel, perhaps even cast a spell … and solve the mystery—with a little help from her friends, not to mention her faithful bloodhound, Rupert.
But she’s hardly participated in an exploratory graveyard crawl and an investigative séance (thanks to Evelyn’s trusty Ouija board) when the paranormal activity escalates—and then turns murderous—leaving Claire wishing it really was just a ghost.