Hanging out in a cemetery isn’t every girl’s idea of a good time, but for Paislee Grimes, the dead can be the best company.

Raised in the sleepy Connecticut town of Pine Grove by an undertaker and a coroner, Paislee has seen more than her fair share of death, and she’s right at home amid the morbid and macabre. She’s happy enough to spend her last months before college cobbling together a history of the place she loves most and studying the lives of the people buried in her backyard, but when the body of a classmate turns up face down in the lake, it’s Paislee’s time to shine.

Armed with a fierce drive and a gift for forensic anthropology, Paislee dives headfirst into the biggest shock Pine Grove has ever seen.

Suddenly everyone is a suspect—friends, love interests, even the mayor. And in a community as tight-knit as hers, no one wants to believe the killer could be one of their own.

But where there’s a murder, there’s a murderer, and with more questions than answers, it’s beginning to look like Paislee is the only one who can connect the dots.

Halloween is only fun when the dead are just pretending…

Paislee Grimes’s quaint Connecticut town doesn’t mess around when it comes to holidays—and her family takes Halloween even more seriously than most.

But this year, something is very wrong on their once-quiet streets. Bodies are piling up, and

Paislee is desperate to piece together clues that point to a killer with a connection to a recent not-quite-solved murder—and a connection to Paislee herself.

Time is running out as the killer drags more Pine Grove residents into a twisted game, and the cryptic pieces of this dark puzzle seem to be circling closer and closer to Paislee and her friends.

But no one threatens the town Paislee loves and gets away with it—and she and her friends won’t rest until the corpses are purely decorative.

This time, it’s personal.

Never put all your skulls in one basket…

Paislee Grimes thought she had it all figured out—solve a huge historical mystery, secure the mayor’s recommendation, and ride the success of her forensics project straight to the college of her dreams.

If only cracking the case on all these murders and grave robberies wouldn’t take up so much of her time…

As the leaves begin to fall in small-town Connecticut and application deadlines creep closer, Paislee must put her project aside to focus on solving the crimes of a killer who’s dead set on carving a date into Paislee’s own tombstone: Halloween night.

Everyone is a suspect, and nothing seems set in stone. For anyone else, the burden might be too much to carry, but Paislee has no choice. 

If she can’t find the killer soon, the future she’s spent so long weaving will be destroyed—and Paislee will be just another skeleton.