Editorial Content for Nine Lives: A Lily Dale Mystery

Recent widow Bella Jordan and her young son, Max, are relocating, but not by choice. Bella’s husband died after a prolonged illness, and then she lost her teaching job. So the two must pull up stakes and start over somewhere else. Neither wants to leave their cozy old rented house, but it’s just been sold. They're headed to Chicago to spend the summer with Bella's critical and difficult mother-in-law, Millicent, while Bella figures out how to get back on her feet financially. Both mother and son are dreading the change, but Bella is determined to make a bit of an adventure out of the trip for Max. Little does she realize the adventure that awaits them.

Bella's old car is hardly road-worthy, but they leave Bedford, New York, behind anyway. As luck would have it, the unreliable vehicle acts up, rattling and clanking along. Stormy weather makes it impractical for them to spend the night at the campground they saw advertised along the road. Instead they find a pregnant cat lying in the road, and now are on a mission to return her to her owner, Leona Gatto. They wind up in the quaint little lakeside village of Lily Dale and pull up in front of an old Victorian inn.

"Continue reading Wendy Corsi Staub’s NINE LIVES to solve the mystery. Then try to explain to yourself, if you can, just how the necklace happened to be hidden for Bella. "

It turns out that Leona has drowned, and none of the local residents can understand why she was near the lake since she was terrified of water. Bella finds herself the temporary innkeeper to an assortment of tourists, most of whom are annual visitors, drawn to the Spiritualist community that is a beehive of activity during the summer. People come here from all over to take classes in numerology and astrology, to learn how to bend spoons with their minds, and most of all, to receive messages from deceased loved ones on The Other Side.

Odd things start to happen: wind chimes clatter and clang when there’s no wind, someone gains entry to a locked room without a key, pages of Leona's appointment book disappear, and Max declares that Chance the Cat will bear eight kittens, which she later does. Bella tries to convince herself that there is a logical explanation for these events (even chalking it all up to coincidence), but the locals hint that there are supernatural things taking place that she could not be expected to understand since she has not been trained in the paranormal.

Bella collects several bits of information, and along with frightening dreams of Leona's death, she comes to the conclusion that Leona did not drown --- she was murdered. Who would want to kill a harmless woman with psychic abilities? What did she know and whom did she know it about that proved to be her undoing? Bella has no detective training and is unfamiliar with the village and its residents, yet she feels compelled to stick around to try to unravel the mystery that she stumbled upon.

As previously mentioned, Chance the Cat does indeed give birth to eight kittens --- much to the delight of Max, who predicted precisely that. He names the first seven cats for the days of the week. The runt of the litter, Spider, needs special care, and Bella is hand-feeding him every two hours as the local vet instructed.

If everyone within a 50-mile radius of the village knows that Leona was terrified of water, and if so many residents are tuned in to the supernatural, then why is it left to Bella, an ordinary visitor with no paranormal training, to try to figure things out?

Continue reading Wendy Corsi Staub’s NINE LIVES to solve the mystery. Then try to explain to yourself, if you can, just how the necklace happened to be hidden for Bella. Now do you perhaps believe in the paranormal, or is this just a neat way to end the book?