Dead to Rites

She inherited a haunted house, a Whiskey Row wine bar, and the ability to see ghosts. Then someone got murdered in her men's room.


Designer Lorelei Cosgrove was perfectly content drifting in Scottsdale — mourning her parents, running a small Etsy shop, and not particularly interested in being responsible for anything more demanding than her own takeout order. Then her great-aunt Hazel passed away and left her a Victorian house in Prescott, a wine/beer/mead bar called Copper State Cellars, and one stubborn stipulation: live there and run the bar, or lose it all.


A near-fatal reaction to a bee sting on Lorelei’s first afternoon in town wakes up a latent Cosgrove family gift — one Hazel apparently forgot to mention. The Victorian’s most prominent resident is Hazel herself, still wearing her twin sets, still bossy as ever, and apparently not too worried about being dead. Then there’s the 1920s Prohibition-era federal agent who haunts Copper State Cellars and calls Lorelei “doll” and the murdered priest who turns up dead in the men’s room — and immediately starts haunting it himself, unable to remember anything about who killed him…or why.


With a local police detective eyeing her as a suspect, a defrocked priest turned bookstore owner she can’t quite figure out, and a local parish where every suspect has a secret worth hiding, Lorelei has to learn the rules of her new gift on the fly. Because ghosts can witness. They can warn. They can mislead.


But what they can’t do is solve the case for her.