Excitement is building as the opening of the Acutis Society's Fairy Tales and Frights haunted house approaches. The members of Saint Clare's gaming group have worked hard to transform the interior of the Myer Mansion into something both magical and scary to entertain the families of Myerton as Halloween approaches.
But does an actual ghost walk the halls of the 170 year old house?
After Nate writes an article for the Myerton Gazette claiming that that ghost of Victoria Myer haunts the mansion, Father Tom wants a retraction--until the story is picked up by the Baltimore paper and ticket sales go through the roof.
Still, Father Tom knows there's no such thing as ghosts . . . Right?
When he finds Catherine Conway in an upstairs room talking to someone he can't see--a woman asking for a priest to say Masses and prayers for her soul--Father Tom comes to the only conclusion possible.
Victoria Myer still lives in the house. And she's suffering the torments of purgatory.
But when one of the participants in the house is found stabbed to death, Father Tom and Helen must search for an earthly killer before he strikes again.
Susan Mathis was born in and grew up in an extremely small town in Alachua County, Florida where her family has lived for more than 100 years. When Susan was still very young, James (J.R) Mathis was born in a somewhat bigger small town about 100 miles south of where she lived. Within a decade, James' small town would become part of Orlando, the biggest tourist destination in the United States. He was not amused. That is how, while Susan was running barefoot, swimming in lakes full of alligators and feeding chickens, James was sitting in his bedroom reading books faster than his father could bring them home from the library.
Were James and Susan to write their love story, it would definitely be an enemies-to-lovers trope. They met in the library where he was working. He found her demands for books that he had to pull and bring to her so unreasonable that he actually turned her into the head librarian. She in turn was so anxious to drive him away that when some friends secretly set them up she laid out an entire speech about how miserable her life was (she is typically very upbeat). Little did she suspect that he had a passionate attraction to misery and they were married just over a year later.
Fast forward 26 years, three children, four grandchildren and 20 years of James working for the Federal government. He was diagnosed with a highly treatable but still very scary form of cancer. As so often happens, this brush with mortality inspired him to do something he'd always wanted to do, write a novel. After the publication of the second Father Tom Mystery, Susan joined him as coauthor. As far as the Mathises are concerned, writing together is the most fun a couple can have sitting at a computer.
