Ghost in Trouble: A Mystery (Bailey Ruth)

When Bailey Ruth Raeburn passed over into the great beyond, she was delighted to discover her sleuthing days would last an eternity. Joining Heaven's Department of Good Intentions, she uses her unique advantages as a ghost—sometimes you see her, sometimes you don't—to help those in need and ensure the wicked get their just deserts.

However, on this latest mission, Bailey Ruth finds it more difficult than ever to keep up with her boss Wiggins's rules for good spirit deportment. Not only is the woman she is supposed to save determined to thwart Bailey Ruth's good intentions at every turn, she just so happens to be one of Bailey Ruth's oldest enemies. Not that that should matter to one of Heaven's best and brightest emissaries, but still, there is only so much a person can put up with—living or dead.

But solving Bailey Ruth's toughest case yet means managing a recalcitrant charge, a fraudulent medium, a mother's heartbreak, old passions and new, and a telltale rawhide dog bone. Heaven help her!

Publishers Weekly

In Agatha-winner Hart's charming third mystery featuring ghostly emissary Bailey Ruth Raeburn of heaven's Department of Good Intentions (after 2009's Merry, Merry Ghost), Bailey returns to earth to protect Kay Clark, a former Adelaide, Okla., acquaintance, from danger. After the fatal fall of Kay's old boyfriend, Jack Hume, at the Hume estate, the Castle, Kay pays her respects to his family at the Castle, where an enormous vase nearly flattens her. In delightful Topperesque fashion, Bailey appears to Kay in an ever-changing array of fashions as Kay's assistant, Francie de Sales, and together they investigate Kay's brush with the vase. When they discover Jack may have been murdered, suspects range from Hume family members to two of Jack's former lovers. Often disregarding the precepts for earthly visitation (avoiding public notice, not consorting with other departed spirits, etc.), Bailey with her sunny Pollyanna attitude makes an irresistible cozy sleuth. (Oct.)