Who would want to harm an eighty-year-old woman? Weeks after her first dramatic encounter with a long simmering family feud in Catesville, Missouri, Darry Rye finds herself embroiled in another local tragedy: the murder of a beloved teacher in her old classroom. A consortium of local businesswomen, advised by attorney Corinne Green, allow a group of university students to stage a haunted house in the abandoned high school: one last special event before the renovation that would turn the lovely old building into downtown condos. One of the investors, retired history teacher Wanda Perkins, has been a spark plug in Catesville civic affairs for decades. On the eve of the haunted house opening, Miss Perkins becomes an all-too-real ghost, dead in her own classroom. With the police department in chaos, Darry plunges into this new mystery and learns that some of the same local families hold the key to the puzzle. She also begins to suspect that the roots of this heartbreaking violence are tangled around a much older scandal. As she helps the grieving family investigate, Darry also finds herself head over heels in love, for the first time in her life. Suddenly the crumbling of her marriage months before begins to make sense. Coming out in the heartland was not an experience she had anticipated. Life in 1980s Missouri is full of surprises. MISSOURI HALLOWEEN is the second in the Darry Rye Investigations series that began with MISSOURI HOMECOMING.
