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Today on Salty Inspirations, I’m welcoming E.J. Copperman with a character guest post from Where There’s Smoke…, a Haunted Paint Store Mystery featuring Laura Meehan, her ghost-seeing ability, and her very skeptical husband, Roy Ryan. Thanks for stopping by, E.J., and for sharing Roy’s perspective with us!
Meet Roy Ryan: Life with a Ghost in the Paint Store
By E.J. Copperman
My wife sees ghost.
No.
My wife sees ghost. That’s closer to it.
When Laura and I moved from Maryland to her childhood home in Sea Breeze, New Jersey, it was for her to reopen Breezeway Paint and Wallpaper, the store her father Amos had run for 20 years before he passed away from pancreatic cancer, only a few weeks before our move. I think she felt it was what Amos would want her to do, and she was tired of her job as a legal assistant for a law firm near where we’d been living.
I work for a very large corporation, whose name will not appear here, in online research and communication. It’s actually pretty mundane work, but my wife believes that I just about invented the internet and I let her believe it. She thinks I’m a technological genius. I think I’m pretty good at what I do.
The people I work for came down closer to Laura’s side of the argument, so instead of letting me go when I quit the job, they offered me a transfer to a facility they have not far from Sea Breeze, in Egg Harbor Township. This made it possible for us to make the move and attempt to show a profit in the store, without my having to leave my job (and salary) in the process.
But you wanted to know about the ghost, of course. I do tend to get sidetracked, falling down my share of internet rabbit holes and coming up for air hours later. It’s part of my natural curiosity about almost everything that adds to my knowledge and makes me seem like the
oracle my wife believes me to be. I’m good at computer skills, but I still bring the car in to get an oil change instead of doing it myself.
The ghost! Right.
The very day Laura reopened the paint store, an emotional time after Amos’s death, I was still in Maryland preparing the house for the move. But when she called me that night, she had a very unexpected story to tell.
She said she’d seen Amos in the store, talked to him and she thought she was going insane.
My wife is perhaps the least insane person I know, and I told her that. I said the image of her father that she’d seen was probably out of her own imagination, seeing what she wanted to see, and that if I were her I would look for a good psychotherapist to sort it all out. Understanding makes things much less scary. I think I also told her that the “ghost” would probably be gone the next day.
It wasn’t.
Laura said Amos had told her that he found himself in the store almost immediately after he died, and that he was not able to leave the place. When I got up to Sea Breeze to take all of our stuff off the truck (or to let the movers do that), she took me over to the store, which she had renovated and made much less a place of time gone by. And she took me to the office in the back of the store, where she informed me that Amos was hovering around, making comments and generally being Amos. But that was when we found out that only Laura could see and hear the spirit – if you will – of her father. I saw an empty space where she saw the man who had raised her.
Bummer.
A lot of husbands would have interpreted these revelations to be evidence that what my wife was saying indicated a form of mental illness or some medical condition related to her brain. She was already seeing Dr. Abigail Proctor twice a week and was somewhat annoyed when her therapist suggested that the ghost could be real, or from Laura’s imagination, and she would not advocate for one position over the other. This meant that “Abby the Analyst,” as we call her, wasn’t taking sides and Laura would have to figure it out for herself, with some guidance of course.
I decided that for my part the best thing to do was to treat her stories of the ghost as a real, understandable, thing. I would say hello to him when Laura told me he was in the room. I’d look in his direction, under Laura’s tutelage, and speak to him as if I could see him.
And then circumstances got weird. Weirder.
Without going into great detail, which is something I do often, there has been a series of incidents in Sea Breeze that the local police were not investigating thoroughly enough, according to Amos, who was a police detective before buying the paint store. Laura being able to walk among living humans started to investigate. And we’ve found ourselves in some pretty tight situations.
Just lately, Amos’s closest friend, Morris Shaw, came to Sea Breeze from his home in California to commemorate the first anniversary of Amos’s death. He made a startling confession at the time, and the next day was found dead, apparently of a heart attack, in a local hotel. And so Amos Meehan and his daughter had to team up again to find out what had happened, and who was responsible.
Just another week in Sea Breeze, New Jersey.
Where There’s Smoke . . . (A Haunted Paint Store Mystery) by E.J. CoppermanAbout Where There’s Smoke . . .
Where There’s Smoke . . . (A Haunted Paint Store Mystery)
Paranormal Cozy Mystery
Publisher : Severn House
Publication date : August 4, 2026
Setting – New Jersey
Print length : 256 pages
Hardcover
ISBN-10 : 1448320445
ISBN-13 : 978-1448320448
Digital
ASIN : B0H1RND6TL
Paint store owner Laura Meehan must prove her amateur sleuthing skills (again!) when her small town’s public library starts burning in this installment of the Haunted Paint Store cozy mystery series.
Don’t mess with a paint store owner’s safe haven! Laura Meehan has her hands full with her paint store, but also with another case (that she will definitely leave to the police to solve)! The Sea Breeze Public Library is burning and it’s clear from the beginning that it must be arson. Who would want to burn a library down and why? Was it a group of moms protesting what they see as inappropriate book content? Maybe it was someone who didn’t like a title they lent? Or is there something more alarming going on? As a library volunteer, Laura simply has to find out, and together with her IT-savvy husband Roy and her ex-detective father’s ghost (real or imagined still yet to be determined), she stumbles upon a lot of obstacles on her quest to find the truth—and maybe even an arsonist who might strike again! A light-hearted cozy mystery with a paranormal twist and Copperman’s signature wit, humor, and zaniness. Perfect for fans of Copperman’s Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries and Cleo Coyle’s Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, as well as funny and cozy mysteries by Janet Evanovich, Elle Cosimano, and Amanda Flower.
About E.J. Copperman
E.J. Copperman is a figment of someone’s imagination. Sometimes E.J. writes as Jeff Cohen. Where There’s Smoke is his 36th published mystery. But he says he doesn’t write mysteries; he writes comedies that have a mystery in them. It’s up to you to decide if that’s true.
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Tour Participants
August 3 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT
August 3 – Novels Alive – REVIEW
August 4 – Jody’s Bookish Haven – SPOTLIGHT
August 4 – Sarandipity’s – CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 5 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW
August 5 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 5 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
August 6 – Socrates Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 6 – Read Your Writes Book Reviews – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
August 7 – Cozy Up With Kathy – REVIEW, AUTHOR INTERVIEW
August 7 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT
August 8 – StoreyBook Reviews – CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 8 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – SPOTLIGHT
August 9 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
August 10 – Romance Novel Giveaways – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 10 – Because I said so – adventures in parenting – REVIEW
August 10 – From the TBR Pile – REVIEW
August 11 – Ruff Drafts – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 11 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 11 – Salty Inspirations – CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 12 – Sarcastically Yours, Jen – SPOTLIGHT
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As a fan of cozy mysteries, I love having authors stop by Salty Inspirations to share their characters and stories with us. Thanks again to E.J. Copperman for joining me for this tour.
If Where There’s Smoke… sounds like a mystery you’d like to add to your TBR, be sure to check it out. And while you’re here, take a look around the Salty Inspirations blog for more author guests, cozy mysteries, and plenty of other bookish fun.
As always, thanks for stopping by for some Salty Inspirations! —Michelle❤️
