Haunted Bookshop 04 - The Ghost and the Femme Fatale
The local Film Noir festival takes a dark turn when a legendary femme fatale is nearly killed. Now, bookstore owner Penelope Thornton-McClure enlists the help of Jack Shepard, P.I.—even though he and his license expired more than fifty years ago.
Clement's assured cozy debut introduces an appealing heroine, 32-year-old Dixie Hemingway, who's given up her stressful job as a sheriff's deputy in Sarasota, Fla., to become a professional pet sitter. When Dixie calls early one morning on her latest client, a silver-blue Abyssinian named Ghost, she finds a dead man face down in the cat bowl. The contact person (a requirement when you leave an animal with a sitting service) has no clue where Ghost's owner, gorgeous Marilee Doerring, could have gone or why her locks were changed before she left.
Young archaeologist Finn Ryan is laboring for a London auction house when she gets some unlikely luck. Along with the handsome young nobleman Billy Pilgrim, she's inherited a house in Amsterdam, a cargo ship off Borneo South Pacific, and what appears to be a fake Rembrandt.
It’s 1786, and John Holdsworth has lost everything: his son to drowning, his wife to grief, and his home and bookshop to financial difficulties.He’s approached by an agent of Lady Oldershaw with an unusual commission. Her only son, Frank, had been a student at Cambridge University, but is now committed to a madhouse after claiming to have seen a ghost – the wife of a colleague that had died in mysterious circumstances a few months previously.
In a race against time, Lincoln and Amelia are recruited to track down a cargo ship carrying two dozen illigal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer - Youling the Ghost. Can they stop the Ghost before he murders again?
