The Case Files of Thomas Carney

Tom Carney never thought much about death until it happened. After his face hits the floor and his world fades to black, he opens his eyes in a cramped apartment overlooking the mist-shrouded streets of Afterlife, walks downstairs and enters Afterlife Investigations, a detective agency for dead people with issues. Polly, the agency’s sublimely efficient secretary, hands him his sheet of rules (never materialize before a living person, never speak to a living person…) and tells him in no uncertain terms that he is the new principal investigator. Tom doesn't know why he was chosen, but he can't get out of Afterlife until he helps the other unfortunate souls stuck there with him. Considering his limited options, he takes the job. Fortunately, he has help. Finus, his living contact, navigates for him through the material world, handling the tasks which Tom as a spirit cannot do. From the other side, he is aided by Mickey, a former but not reformed poltergeist who tends the only bar in Afterlife, by Bob, a crazy old man who spouts advice in song lyrics and by the repo men who ferry him back and forth to the living world. When beautiful Charlene MacKenzie, the first Mrs. MacKenzie, walks into the agency seeking vengeance for her murder, she knows just who did it...Elena, the second Mrs. MacKenzie. Tom soon learns that to resolve her case he’ll have to solve the Elena paradox—how one woman can be ageless and seductive among the living and at the same time catatonic in a dreary apartment in Afterlife. He discovers a phantom child is the key to unmasking an entity neither living nor dead would wish to meet.