All Sally O'Brian wants is a quiet Christmas. Yes, she wants to rent out her newly renovated and re-furnished Cliff House for the holiday season, but that goal is secondary to just spending some quiet family time with her daughter Jennifer, her son-in-law Jack, her delightful granddaughter Kiera...and her dead husband Matthew. But then she learns that her daughter has invited a whole host of family members to come and celebrate Christmas with them. While this normally would be a great source of joy for Sally, she's discovered a terrible secret. The ornaments she's bought to decorate the Cliff House where all her relatives will be staying are haunted. And the ghosts that haunt those decorations are the kind of ghosts that like to play tricks on the living. Sally is afraid that this will be one Christmas no one wants to remember.

Sally O'Brian is delighted when she is asked to help the children at the school where she had taught for most of her career to plant a vegetable garden. The portion of the school yard where the Principal wanted to place the garden was wasted space, a large mud pit that had filled with water after the recent winter rains.She and two friends work out the details of how to drain the water, then fill the pits with extra soil to level the area out. It's a great plan...until she hears a voice calling to her. "Help me!" cries an ethereal voice that only Sally can hear. Then, as the water level recedes and the mud is scraped away, the eighth graders uncover a human hand. "Get the children back inside," yells Sally. She certainly can't allow the children to learn that there's a ghost in the garden.

Detective MacFarland -- "Mac" to his friends -- was kicked off the Denver police force for a variety of reasons, most of which came out of the mistrial of the man who murdered his wife. While getting back on his feet by operating a small hot dog cart, MarFarland is approached by a high-priced lawyer to help prove a woman innocent. Can MacFarland find the real killer and free the innocent woman?Detective MacFarland -- "Mac" to his friends -- was kicked off the Denver police force for a variety of reasons, most of which came out of the mistrial of the man who murdered his wife. After a couple of years on the streets, MacFarland is getting back on his feet by operating a small hot dog cart. He doesn’t make much money, gives a lot of his product to his former homeless friends, and studies language CDs in his spare time. He's put his detective days behind him, and he's happy that way.But then MarFarland is approached by a high-priced lawyer to help prove a woman innocent. A fishing buff has been found murdered and the wife is the prime suspect. With the evidence stacked against her, and someone destroying evidence, can MacFarland find the real killer and free the innocent woman?This is a cozy mystery with amateur sleuth. This is a 70,000 words novel.

Sally O'Brian sees ghosts. Not because she wants to. But when someone tried to kill her and her husband, she discovered that while his time had come, hers had not. Now she was back in this plane of existence, but this time with a mission. Her role in life was to help those who could not pass over to the other side to do so. And that mission included the plaintive voice of a young teenager who had witnessed the murder of a young man in the Cliff House. And the ghost was willing to help Sally solve the current-day murder, but only after Sally had found out who had killed the unfortunate teenager eighty years earlier.