Casey Daniels: Don of the Dead
The set up of Don of the Dead is really quite clever – Pepper Martin, a tour guide at a Cleveland cemetery, falls and cracks her head on the corner of a mausoleum and is thereafter able to see the spirit of the resident of that mausoleum, one Gus Scarpetti, a one time crime boss who had been gunned down by an unknown assailant thirty years earlier. Seeing him isn’t the real problem, however, as Gus can also talk to Pepper, and demands that she solve his murder, threatening to haunt her until she does so. Even though men (and ghosts) can’t seem to stop staring at her generously endowed chest, there’s more to Pepper than meets the eye. The daughter of a rich doctor who was convicted and sent to prison for fraud, she’s still smarting from her vertiginous fall from grace, the desertion of her much loved fiancee, and the realization that her privileged upbringing hasn’t prepared her for much now that the privilege has been removed.