On Maryland's salt-swept Eastern Shore, a woman reporter has a dilapidated old house, a dysfunctional family, and a talent for solving mysteries. How does wisecracking, love-burned Hollis Ball find out so much about other people's secrets? Just ask the ghost at her side. Once he was her husband--and not a very good one at that. Now Sam Wescott is a ghost. And what he lacks in respect for Hollis's privacy, he makes up in his ability to talk to the dead. For Hollis, Sam's talent has never come in handier. A vintage Cadillac has been resurrected from the muddy waters beneath a highway bridge, and in it are the bones of a woman. Now a community of fishermen, crabbers, and local boys-turned-millionaires is being ripped apart by a mysterious death thirty years old. And when another body is found in Chesapeake Bay, Hollis and Sam join forces: to catch a killer who is alive and all too well....

Ghost of a Chance

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Chappell, Helen

Mystery

Dell

Elvis lives! Until someone starts killing off his impersonators, one by one... As a reporter for a local newspaper on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Hollis Ball sees more of life than most. As an amateur sleuth, she also sees more of death...especially since her partner is a ghost. Sam Wescott, Hollis's living-impaired ex-husband, is prone to materialize at awkward moments--like when Hollis is out on a date. But he's indispensable at a crime scene. And when an Elvis impersonator, in town for a gala contest, is murdered at a sleazy motel, Hollis needs Sam's divine intervention. Her ne'er-do-well godfather, Albie Lydekker, flew in from Vegas just to emcee the Elvis competition...and he made an unwitting Hollis one of the judges. Now, surrounded by sequined singers, Hollis is wondering if she is also a patsy...as an unpopular gambling referendum, a missing mobster, and an old memory set her up to shake, rattle, and die.

Giving up the Ghost (Brilliant Series)

HOLLIS BALL JUST RECEIVED AN ODD REQUEST FROM HER EX-HUSBAND: FIND THE PERSON WHO MURDERED HIM. . . . When charming rich kid Sam Wescott dies in a fatal boating accident, few mourn his untimely death. But perhaps the person most shocked to shed a tear is reporter Hollis Ball, his former wife, who was abandoned by him ten years before on their honeymoon. Now he is gone. Or is he? For Sam's ghost brings Hollis the interesting news that his accidental death was really murder, and pesters her to find his killer. She would like to say no. But ever susceptible to his no-good upper-class wiles--even in their present somewhat spectral form--she says yes. And plops down into the middle of a whopping big story that involves Sam's old-line family, a group of ecoactivists, and some very hot political potatoes. . . .

Slow Dancing with the Angel of Death

Fawcett

JUDGE FINDLAY S. FISH NEVER KNEW WHAT HIT HIM. . . . The murder weapon was an expensive antique snow goose decoy--a treasure that a zillion others at the Eastern Shore Decoy Jamboree would gladly kill for. Reporter Hollis Ball of The Watertown Gazette wasn't too crazy about Judge Fish, who recently gave a convicted wife murderer a light sentence. But Hollis is certain that her old schoolmate didn't bash the judge, as the police suspect. So she lets her dead ex-husband--that charming ghost Sam Wescott--suck her into finding the real killer. When they succeed, Hollis will have the story of her life . . . if she lives to write about it.

Dead Duck (Sam and Hollis, Book 2)

In the tradition of Fannie Flagg, veteran storyteller Helen Chappell, acclaimed author of Giving Up the Ghost, presents a wry, funny, and poignant novel about two sisters, their dead mother, and a Chesapeake Bay town where anything can happen and frequently does. Sometimes you have to go home again, even if you know the trip is going to be one from hell. When Carrie points her van in the direction of Oysterback, Maryland, her old hometown, she does it only because she has no choice. Her momma, the indomitable Audrey, has done the unthinkable: she's died. And it wasn't a neat little Oysterback death either. No, it happened in Florida and involved an alligator. But, then again, there was nothing conventional about Audrey, even in life. The same could be said for her daughter Carrie -- single, perpetually searching, and professionally adrift, she has become an expert at yard sales, sifting through the detritus of other folks' lives, then reselling it to shops that sell antiques and assorted "collectibles." Her sister, Earlene, considers Carrie a junk collector, but then Earlene has devoted her life to being conventional. Married with two boys, she has remained in Oysterback where she and her husband run the View 'n' Chew, a combination video store-sandwich shop. Momma had lived by the notion that a woman is incomplete without a man and spent the years following her husband's death trying to be as complete as humanly possible -- in the process working her way through a whole parade of men. As best Carrie can figure, her momma's last two flames were Alonzo Deaver, the town's resident miscreant and a current resident of the state penitentiary, and Jack Shepherd, a college professor on the run from failure and boredom. Both had been granted carte blanche to crash at Momma's house whenever the occasion should arise (be it Alonzo's planned escape from prison or Jack's escape from his ratty little boat). Once back in Oysterback, Carrie finds herself unwittingly caught up in a family drama of epic proportions -- including Earlene's resentment (which leads to a classic -- and very messy -- confrontation), a now-married ex-boyfriend's attempt to rekindle an old flame, her own attraction to Professor Jack, and a roiling stew of anger and grief over Momma's poorly timed passing. For while Carrie never expected to go home again, she naively believed it always would be there. A Whole World of Trouble is a delightfully authentic comedy of Southern manners and an antic, frequently hilarious, pointed, and moving novel by a writer who knows the people and the world she writes about.

A Whole World of Trouble: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Simon&Schuster

From the author of The Oysterback Tales, a unique and elegiac look at the region's past and its tales of love and tragedy, loss and remembrance. 
"There is a romantic, nostalgic, pleasantly melancholy feeling to old cemeteries that is hard to define but easy to experience. Perhaps it is because we can feel the direct link to our past that no history book, no movie, no historical fantasy can ever convey. These stones and these unkempt grounds are the hard evidence of lives that came before us. Once, these people lived and breathed, loved, worked, fought, hoped and despaired, and experienced their triumphs and failures just as we do today. And, although we seldom care to acknowledge it, we will inevitably go where they have gone."―from the Preface
For the many people who enjoy walking through old cemeteries, exploring forgotten and overgrown graveyards, and reading the names, dates, and epitaphs of the dead, the Chesapeake Bay region offers a rich assortment of final resting places, many dating back to the early 1600s. From Williamsburg to Havre de Grace, it is not uncommon to see a number of the living wandering among the markers of the dead. Some are genealogists and historians, others come in search of quietude and a tangible connection to the past.
In The Chesapeake Book of the Dead, Helen Chappell and photographer Starke Jett survey this rich legacy, from the vast and imposing Arlington National Cemetery to lone graves so modest as to have been lost almost as soon as they were dug. Chappell and Jett visit graveyards of the famous and the obscure, wander through cemeteries dotted with both elaborate funerary and simple, weather-beaten headstones, and discover epitaphs that range from the literary to the amusing to the poignant. As old grave sites disappear under developers' bulldozers, through neglect, and at the hands of unscrupulous headstone collectors, this remarkable book offers a unique and elegiac look at our past and its tales of love and tragedy.
Among the cemeteries explored are Southeast Washington's Congressional Cemetery (posthumous home to composer John Philip Sousa, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, pioneering feminist and muckraking journalist Anne Royall, and Choctaw chief and notable military tactician Pushmataha); Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery (built in the 1830s as Baltimore's first sylvan graveyard); and Westminster Burying Ground in downtown Baltimore. At Westminster lies the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, which a mysterious figure visits each year on Poe's birthday to leave roses and a bottle of brandy. The book also describes the final resting places for such celebrities as Dorothy Parker (Chappell located her ashes at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (buried in Rockville at Scott's wish, because, he insisted, "I belong here," in Maryland, "where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite"), and cosmopolitan actress Tallulah Bankhead (interred in a plot her sister provided near Chestertown).
Included throughout this fascinating book are essays on mourning fashion and deathbed performances, graveyard ghost stories, discussions of efforts to save historic cemeteries, and notes from the diary of a nineteenth-century doctor who today is buried in Rising Sun Cemetery alongside many of his patients. Chappell's lively prose, accompanied by Jett's haunting black-and-white photographs, will delight all those drawn to the seclusion, peacefulness, and melancholy of old graveyards.
Jacket illustration: Lower Hooper's Island, Maryland

The Chesapeake Book of the Dead: Tombstones, Epitaphs, Histories, Reflections, and Oddments of the Region

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Johns Hopkins University Press

The Oysterback Tales

Once you find yourself in Oysterback, you may never want to leave. Nothing beats Desiree Grinch's corn soup at the Blue Crab Tavern. There's never a wait at The Curl Up 'N Dye Salon de Beaute. In season, you can buy your produce (as you pay your respects) at Dreedle's Funeral Parlor. There's bingo every Tuesday at the V.F.D. The Mosquito Festival is next week. And when the moon hangs over Widgeon Marsh as full and yellow as one of Miss Nettie's oyster fritters, you'll know you're in a place like no other.
Since 1988, readers of the Baltimore Sun have delighted in regular visits to Oysterback―Helen Chappell's mythical town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Chappell's stories capture the unique charm of rural life on the Shore, and her memorable characters typify the folksy strength and eccentricity of the natives. "In Oysterback," as the town's Captain Saloman observes, "we have characters we haven't even used yet."

United States

The waxing moon;: A gentle guide to magic

Links

Helen Chappell writes in and about the Delmarva region, Maryland's Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay region. This collection is a must, if only to read "The Riddle of the Shoes." (We had wondered about it ourselves for so many years, Helen. Thanks for letting us know we're not alone, unlike that marabou mule.)

Road Rage & Rummage Sales

Business & Money

Nanticoke Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chappell, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Chappell, Helen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chappell, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ghost of a Chance

Giving up the Ghost (Brilliant Series)

Slow Dancing with the Angel of Death

Dead Duck (Sam and Hollis, Book 2)

A Whole World of Trouble: A Novel

The Chesapeake Book of the Dead: Tombstones, Epitaphs, Histories, Reflections, and Oddments of the Region

The Oysterback Tales

The waxing moon;: A gentle guide to magic

Road Rage & Rummage Sales

A Whole World of Trouble: A Novel