Angie Fox

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Published by: Moose Island Books
Release Date: February 27, 2026
Pages: 253
ISBN13: 978-1957685335

 

Overview

Ghost hunter Verity Long has forty-eight hours to plan her sister's dream wedding on a budget that wouldn't even cover the cake. The venue? A stunning Irish manor in Jackson, Tennessee—enemy territory for any self-respecting citizen of Sugarland. But the place is perfect, the photos are free, and Melody is over the moon.

There's just one tiny catch. Two dead grooms, fifty years apart. And Alec's timing? It couldn't be worse.

Between her ghostly gangster sidekick Frankie bent on stealing the Irish Crown Jewels, a deadly secret hidden under the wedding chapel, and her sweet skunk Lucy finding romance with a boy skunk from the wrong side of the tracks, Verity's got her hands full. And when someone close to her is murdered, she's running out of time.

Can Verity protect the people she loves and give her sister the wedding of her dreams? Or will she lose everything before Melody can say "I do"?

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Excerpt

Lucy the skunk nosed a ripe red apple across the grass, her double white stripe shimmying as she crouched low, her rear end wiggling. Tail swishing, she batted the fruit like a ball, then darted sideways when it rolled straight at her.

A balmy afternoon breeze rustled through the trees under the cloudless blue sky. From overhead, a second apple broke free and hit the ground next to her with a soft thunk.

My little girl shot straight up, spun, and landed a foot away. She glared at the ambushing apple, and I felt a laugh bubble up. Poor thing. Life had a way of throwing curveballs when you least expected them.

“Eyes on the sock,” Frankie barked at me. 

I turned to find my gangster ghost housemate pointing at the curious contraption I held between two fingers, like it was evidence of a crime. Which, technically, it had been for most of the last century. 

“You lost one of your vital ingredients,” he groused, as if I were the worst criminal in the world.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him moonshining was legal now.

I located the penny on the ground and picked it up, wincing at what I was about to do to my favorite pink fluffy sock. The one with the polka dots. “Can’t I just put the pennies in the sock?”

His eyes bugged out. “If you want to do it the easy way.”

I looked past the ghost, to the steaming, shuddering copper contraption that dominated the patch of grass in front of my rosebushes. “Easy went out the window when you made me sing ‘Sweet Sue’ to that monstrosity.” 

The moonshine still I’d inherited from my great-great-grandmother gleamed in the afternoon sun, then let out a loud, vibrating belch that made my teeth rattle.

In fact, “easy” went out the window the second I’d accidentally trapped Frankie the German on my property. It had begun innocently enough. I’d simply dumped out what looked like a filthy old vase over my rosebushes. Ashy dirt is great for the roots, or so I’d heard. 

Only it wasn’t a vase. It was an urn.

And when I hosed Frankie’s ashes deep into the soil, I’d grounded the 1920s gangster to my two acres of heaven. I never would have imagined it possible until he went and mustered up the energy to go all scary specter on me. Of course, that was after I’d filled his urn with water and added a nice, fat rose blossom.

Some days I still wasn’t sure which of us had gotten the worse end of that deal.

Over the years, we’d made peace. Sort of. The kind of peace where he thought he was in charge, and I let him have his delusion as long as he kept his ghostly poker nights to the porch and his shoot-outs off my lawn. 

At least now we were sharing a hobby.

Frankie rubbed a hand down the side of the moonshine still with the reverence most men saved for classic cars. “Attagirl, Betsy Sue.”

I took a step back. “She’d better not explode.”

“She won’t,” he said with the confidence of a man who’d already blown himself up several times and considered it character building.

Technically, she was Betsy Sue the Fifth, on account of the first four Frankie-built stills exploding in spectacular fashion. Luckily, those fireworks had gone off on the ghostly plane, where they’d only given Frankie a few temporary holes and an involuntary nap at the bottom of my pond. But this distiller was right here with us in the land of the living, and I had no desire to set the house on fire or explain to the Sugarland Fire Department how my car had gotten launched into a tree.

“All art is a risk,” the gangster said, like he was Michaelangelo discussing the Sistine Chapel instead of a dead bootlegger coaxing hooch from a contraption held together with baling wire and hope.

I wondered how many times the gangster had blown himself up after he’d died. Then decided I didn’t want to know.

As a ghost, he appeared no worse for wear in his pin-striped suit and cuffed trousers. He wore the same clothes he’d died in. Though he appeared in black and white, I could see through him. Just barely.

Frankie had appointed himself my mentor for illegal backyard moonshine brewing, and I’d conveniently neglected to tell him I’d gotten a permit. He was having too much fun corrupting me.

“You asked for this.” He pointed a finger at me, and I could practically see him vibrating with excitement. 

Technically, I had. I’d somehow gotten the big idea that we could whip up a batch of my great-great-grandma’s legendary Firefly Moonshine to raise money for the new women’s center downtown. The recipe had been lost until we’d unearthed it on our last adventure, and Frankie was treating the whole project like a mission from the Almighty. 

Or perhaps someone a little farther south.

“Wrap it like you’re tying a gag on the mayor,” he instructed. “You don’t want him screaming, but you don’t want to leave visible marks, either.” 

“Because I do that all the time,” I said, sparing him a glance as I folded my doomed sock around the pennies.

Frankie caught my look and lowered his Panama hat over the neat, round bullet hole in the center of his forehead. The one that had killed him. 

He was sensitive about it.

“You’ve got to get it tight, or the pennies will get too hot and start shooting out like firecrackers.”

In my yard? Near my skunk? Not on your life. “We’ll leave out the pennies.”

Frankie snorted. “Fine. Do it. Dump out your great-great-grandma’s legacy.”

I stopped cold. He knew exactly what buttons to push, and family legacy was a big one. We were brewing up our first batch of hooch—well, my first batch—using the antique still that had been part of my suffragette great-great-grandmother’s operations. She’d been ahead of her time, running moonshine to fund the fight for women’s suffrage. This distiller was part of her story, and mine. 

Just then, it let out a loud, rumbling belch.

“Get the sock in the pipe!” Frankie bellowed. “Before the pressure valve gives and launches that milk can through your kitchen window.”

I stuffed my sock into the copper opening while he grabbed a wrench to tighten a pipe on the ghostly side. The moonshine still was a masterpiece of creative engineering—a water heater wrapped in copper squares and secured with baling wire, topped with flattened milk cans sealed with red clay. Copper pipes shot through makeshift holes, and the whole contraption tilted left, feeding into a series of catch basins that ended in a washtub fitted with copper mesh.

It bubbled and hissed, sending up a cloud of steam that smelled like peaches and gasoline. 

That couldn’t be good.

Frankie’s ultra-secret brewing technique called for a dirty sock, but I hadn’t been quite willing to manage that, so I’d snuck in a clean one instead.