No Ghosts Need Apply

A ghost story becomes a matter of murder. "The world is big enough for us," Sherlock Holmes once told Dr. Watson. "No ghosts need apply." But amateur sleuth Sebastian McCabe and his chronicler Jeff Cody don't have a choice when a popular TV reality show comes to Erin, Ohio, to record a Halloween special about the entity disturbing a local gastropub known as The Speakeasy. Jackie O'Brien was a bootlegger and speakeasy owner gunned down in 1920. Ever since, his unquiet spirit has been said to haunt the building where it happened - one which, after many transformations over the years, is once again a speakeasy of sorts. There may be skeptics, but Erin's exorcist is not among them. Nor is Sebastian McCabe, who has been up close and personal with the ghost. Both are among those interviewed by Stuart Diamond, specialist in the strange, who has come to town along with Chef Stephen Lipinski and his producer wife to record the episode of the show Dining (Way) Out. What was expected to be some fun publicity for the gastropub turns into a nightmare after someone is shot to death one night in the same place and in the same way as Jackie O'Brien almost exactly 100 years earlier. Police Chief Oscar Hummel recognizes this as Mac's kind of case, but Mac and Jeff are forced to become virtual sleuths most of the time when the restaurant and many other businesses are shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before he solves the murder-and a second homicide-Mac makes an embarrassing blunder in one lesser case and scores a great triumph in another.