Murder at the Pumpkin Pageant

It’s Halloween weekend and Beacon Harbor, Michigan, has a packed schedule of events, including the Pumpkin Pageant, featuring humans and their canine counterparts. For treats, there’s plenty of pumpkin goodness from bakery/café owner and local lighthouse resident Lindsey Bakewell. But someone wants to spoil the fun with a deadly trick . . .

Lindsey prefers to keep her bakeshop’s Halloween decor light and autumnal, rather than gruesome and ghoulish. But everyone knows her lighthouse home is haunted. Some intrepid teens have even tried to break in to witness the resident ghost themselves. Dreading Halloween night, Lindsey reluctantly allows her influencer and podcaster best friend, Kennedy, to host a live ghost-hunting investigation in the lighthouse, conducted by a professional team. Protective of her ghost, Lyndsey is understandably nervous about what they might uncover . . .

The segment is uneventful—until things take a terrifying turn. The team freaks out. As Kennedy joins the mad dash outside, she bumps into what looks like the prankster teens’ creepy clown costume hanging from a tree. But when Lindsey’s dog, Wellington, begins to whine, they make a grim discovery: the clown is no dummy. It’s a corpse.

Now Lindsey and company will need to keep their cool if they want a ghost of a chance to solve the murder—and see another Halloween . . .

Darci Hannah grew up in the northwest suburbs of a Chicago, is a graduate of Indiana University, and currently lives in a small town in Michigan with her husband, three sons and two dogs. She has lived around the Great Lakes all her life and considers them a source of inspiration. When she's not engaged in a rollicking family adventure, walking her dogs, or working at the historic Howell Carnegie District Library, she's either baking up a storm or hard at work on her next Beacon Bakeshop Mystery. Visit her at DarciHannah.com.