Casey Daniels - Northeast Ohio's Queen of Halloween

Halloween is Northeast Ohio mystery writer Casey Daniels' favorite time of year. She grows her own pumpkins, has boxes and boxes of decorations, and even owns enough Halloween socks to wear a different pair every day for the whole month of October.

That's fitting for a woman that loves cemeteries and writes a mystery series about a woman who solves murders for dead people--that's right, Casey's character, Pepper Martin, talks to ghosts, but only friendly and interesting ones.

Daniels, a Brecksville resident, released her third novel in the "Pepper Martin" series last year, titled "Tombs of Endearment." This fun read has Ms. Martin, a cemetery tour guide, involved in solving a decades old murder whose victim she encounters at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The cemetery where Pepper works closely resembles Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery and the book is filled with other Northeast Ohio references.

Casey Daniels is busy this season promoting the book at bookstores and other events around the area. You'll find her at the Buckeye Book Fair in Wooster this Saturday, November 1. She also writes a regular Wednesday blog at "The Little Blog of Murder," with other Ohio authors.

What's next for Casey? She's busy at work on "One Boo over the Cuckoo's Nest," which finds Pepper in Chicago for a cemetery convention, only to be held prisoner in a mental hospital. The book is due out in early 2009. Previous books in the series are "Don of the Dead" and "Chick and the Dead."

To shop for your own copy of "Tombs of Endearment," click here.

^{(photo courtesy of Casey Daniels)}