What Makes a Proper Paranormal Museum?
When I titled my first cozy mystery The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum, I didn’t think Midnight Ink would let me keep the name. It’s too long for a decent tweet. It barely fits on a book cover. And sometimes even my tongue gets twisted saying it out loud.
But I’m glad they did, because the title usually gets a laugh. What, after all, could be perfectly proper about a paranormal museum?
One hosting a corpse, for starters. This is a mystery novel, after all.
What else might you find in the museum? A black cat with an attitude. A creepy doll room. A haunted rocking chair.
But it’s the people who really perfect the paranormal museum. The museum’s new owner, Maddie Kosloski, has to fend off a taxidermist determined to get his creations into the collection, a middle-aged collector of supernatural objects, and a range of quirky friends, frenemies, and relatives. Someone seems to always be dropping by bearing food and random demands.
Maddie might not believe in the supernatural, but her oversized imagination makes up for the lack. And she’s happy to cater to those who do believe, whether they be ghost hunters or goths or guests recovering from a tasting at a nearby winery.
The museum’s historical objects exert a powerful fascination over Maddie. Was that spirit cabinet really used by Madame Blavatsky’s second cousin to communicate with ghosts? Is the haunted Houdini poster an original or a reproduction? Notes on the exhibits are scarce and speculative, so Maddie’s got a lot of research to do... If solving a present-day murder mystery doesn’t kill her first.
So I invite you to crack open a book and enter the strange and wacky world of The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum, where nothing is as it seems, and murder is just around the corner…
Thanks, Kirsten! I'm trying to imagine what I'd like to see in a paranormal museum. Ooh, a haunted reliquary! I'd have to avoid the creepy doll room <shiver>. What about you, readers -- what do you imagine might be lurking in Kirsten's paranormal museum?
Kirsten Weiss worked overseas for nearly fourteen years in the fringes of the former USSR and in Southeast Asia. Her experiences abroad sparked an interest in the effects of mysticism and mythology, and how both are woven into our daily lives.
Now based in San Mateo, CA, she writes steampunk suspense and paranormal mysteries, blending her experiences and imagination to create a vivid world of magic and mayhem. Kirsten has never met a dessert she didn’t like, and her guilty pleasures are watching Ghost Whisperer re-runs and drinking red wine. Sign up for her newsletter to get free updates on her latest work at: http://kirstenweiss.com
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