Showing results by author "Erin McCarthy" in All Categories

Spring has sprung in Cleveland and home stager (and lousy spiritual medium) Bailey Burke is facing all kinds of major life changes. Both her grandmother and her boyfriend Jake Marner have moved in with her, she is contemplating a career change, and Marner’s mother needs her help planning a thirtieth birthday party for him. Party plans include dance lessons for Bailey and Jake. Which would be fun, except their instructor appears to have tangoed with the wrong partner. She’s found dead on the dance floor, a butchered ballroom teacher with multiple stab wounds.

With Bailey Burke’s design and staging business booming—it turns out tangling with a serial killer is the best advertising ever—she has no time to lament her lack of love life, or wonder where her dead friend Ryan’s ghost has gone. She hasn’t seen him in months, but when she finds a body in a home she’s been hired to stage she’s hounded by the dead man’s ghost.

All Bailey Burke wants for Christmas is to stop seeing dead people. A reluctant spiritual medium, she craves a stress-free holiday with no ghosts popping in and out of her house. But when Bailey does the décor for a huge fundraising party featuring a replica slide from A Christmas Story, no one expects to find Santa’s dead body. In the slide. From three years ago. With the current Santa-for-hire and the dead Santa’s ghost harassing her, there isn’t enough eggnog in Cleveland to save Bailey’s night.

When the bitterly cold days of January descend on Cleveland, Bailey Burke finds her “Put It Where?” home staging business is as frozen as her toes. The only bright spot is the return of her friend Ryan after his, ahem, eviction from heaven. Especially since no other dead people seem to be harassing her in recent weeks. Yet when her grandmother’s bingo buddy turns up frozen solid in a stranger’s back yard, Bailey is the only one who finds the death suspicious.

It was complicated back then. It’s even more so now. Because former mean girl Sloane rolls back in town to find Rick stripping at a charity event like he was born with biceps. And single dad Rick is her landlord. And her brother will murder him if he has sex with her. But sometimes you have to strip it all down to see what was there all along.