Welcome back to the small town of Celebration Bay—where the Halloween festivities are full of more tricks than treats… This October in Celebration Bay, you can’t swing a black cat without hitting a haunted house. There are three finalists in the contest for the town’s official Haunted House, and ten thousand dollars will go to the winner, with the rest of the contributions and proceeds funding a new community center. Event coordinator Liv Montgomery has invited her friend Jonathan Preston, the debonair CEO of a philanthropic organization, hoping he will award a grant to the center. But after the Museum of Yankee Horrors wins first place, the transformed Victorian boarding house is vandalized...and among scattered mannequins of Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, and the Headless Horseman, a real dead body is found—one of the contest judges. Now in addition to playing host to Jon, Liv has to play detective and coordinate the clues to unmask a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. Praise for the Celebration Bay Mysteries “If you like small-town gossip, long-buried secrets, and festivals galore, you’ll love this new series.”— RT Book Reviews “All the charm of a Norman Rockwell painting, but with a much more colorful cast of characters!”—Cynthia Baxter, author of the Reigning Cats & Dogs Mysteries “A great summer read to take to the beach, and not just for a holiday weekend. Freydont has humor mixed in with a full story line that will have you guessing with each page.”—Fresh Fiction “Freydont is a skilled writer...the dialogue is funny and fast, and the plot carries the reader along swiftly...[A] very enjoyable series.”— Kings River Life Magazine Shelley Freydont is the author of several mystery series, including the Newport Gilded Age Mysteries, the Celebration Bay Mysteries, and the mysteries featuring Lindy Haggerty and Katie McDonald. As Shelley Noble, she is the New York Times bestselling author of several women's fiction novels. Her books have been translated into seven languages. Chapter One Liv Montgomery stopped at the bottom of the town hall steps to button her jacket. A year before, she’d moved to Celebration Bay, New York, from Manhattan, complete with a totally new “country” wardrobe of corduroy, plaids, comfortable shoes, even a hat with earflaps. Now she only brought out the earflaps when it was below ten degrees, which, being early October, it wasn’t, and her jacket had finally lost its shiny, right-off-the-racks-at-L.L.Bean look. And she was getting a lot fewer digs about being a city girl. Actually, since she’d taken over the duties of town event planner, attendance at activities had tripled, and she was becoming an accepted member of the community, most of the time. Her assistant, Ted Driscoll, a tall, lean man of a certain age and an untalked-about past, tucked up his collar, then took her elbow. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a black pullover with a bat knitted onto the front. Ted loved his holidays, and the women at the Yarn Barn kept him in festive sweaters, scarves, vests, and hats. He had a good singing voice, adored Liv’s white Westie, Whiskey, knew his way around a computer, and had nerves of steel. In a word, he was the best assistant Liv had ever had. It was late afternoon and already dark, except for the lights from restaurants and shops and the wrought iron lamps that lit the paths through the park. Being a family-friendly destination town, the inhabitants of Celebration Bay had the changeover from one holiday to the next down to a science. On September thirtieth, the Harvest on the Bay Festival transformed into Halloween, literally overnight. Town-wide decorations of colorful leaves and fall vegetables turned into broomsticks and bats. Gourds and pumpkins were carved into grimacing jack-o’-lanterns. Bales of hay that had offered respite to weary tourists were now the property of skeletons and witches. They crossed the street and joined the scores of people headed toward the band shell at the far side of the village square, where the mayor would shortly announce the winner of Celebration Bay’s first ever haunted house contest. “So who do you think will win Best Haunted House tonight?” Liv asked. “I think Barry Lindquist’s Museum of Yankee Horrors takes the cake. My unofficial opinion, of course.” “It is pretty impressive,” Liv said. “I knew about Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, and the Headless Horseman, but there were a bunch of crimes I never realized took place in New England.” Ted coughed out a laugh, sending a cloud into the air. “In true Celebration Bay style, Barry played loose with some of the more sordid efforts. Al Capone? I mean, since when did Chicago belong to the northeast?” “I did wonder about that,” Liv said. “Anyway I think it’s a toss-up between his museum and Ernie Bolton’s Monster Mansion.” “You screamed loud enough when that skeleton popped out of the coffin.” Liv grimaced. “I wasn’t expecting it.” “That’s the whole point. Now, do you want to