Haunted Paint Store Mysteries Books in Order

The Haunted Paint Store books take one of Jeffrey Cohen's favorite setups, an ordinary New Jersey business with grief and money problems already built in, and then add a ghost. Laura Meehan has recently lost her father and heads back to her hometown to take over the paint and wallpaper store he left behind. She moves her husband Roy with her, tries to convince herself this is a sensible decision, and immediately learns that sensible has left the building. Her father's ghost is still hanging around the shop.

That father is Amos Meehan, and he is not just any helpful apparition. Before he opened the store, Amos worked as a police detective, which means Laura has inherited both a business and an investigator who refuses to stay buried. The dynamic is easy to see. Laura is grieving, uncertain, and trying to act practical. Amos is dead, opinionated, and still inclined to think like a cop. Whether Laura fully trusts what she is seeing or not, he is not going away.

Retail is hard enough without the afterlife weighing in.

All Spooked Up introduces the world by turning Breezeway Paint and Wallpaper into a murder scene. A local painter ends up dead in the shop, and Laura suddenly has a business to protect, a town full of suspects, and a ghostly father insisting he can help. That setup tells you what kind of series this is likely to be. The cases grow out of everyday local ties, customers, contractors, neighbors, old grudges, and the kind of history that clings to a shore town long after people pretend they have moved on.

The tone sits very close to Cohen's paranormal cozies. The supernatural element is real, but it is not there to make the series dark or frightening. It is there to put pressure on family relationships, memory, and unfinished business. Laura is not chasing ancient curses. She is trying to keep a store open, manage a marriage during a major life change, and figure out why somebody thought her father's business was a good place to dump a body. The humor comes from her skepticism, Amos's persistence, and the absurdity of having to solve practical problems while talking to the dead.

Because the series is new, All Spooked Up does a lot of world building, and that is part of the appeal. You get the shop, the family tension, the small-town gossip, and the promise that Amos's old detective instincts will keep dragging Laura toward trouble. If you like cozy mysteries where the setting doubles as the heart of the story, this one gives you paint cans, murder, and one very unretired father.