The Busy Body

Book 1: Ghostwriter Mystery

by Kemper Donovan

Genres: Traditional Mysteries; Female Sleuths; Ghost; Mystery

Synopsis

Veep meets Agatha Christie in this intelligent, wildly funny, literary mystery for fans of Richard Osman, Anthony Horowitz, and Nita Prose!

"A delight from start to finish. If you like Agatha Christie, you’ll love this.” - Alex Michaelides, # 1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient

The host of the "All About Agatha" podcast injects the spark and fizz of a Golden Age murder mystery into the present-day, as a ghostwriter is chosen to collaborate on a presidential candidate’s memoir, only to discover just how much trouble a smart woman with time on her hands can get up to . . .

“I tell other people’s stories for a living. . . . I nip and tuck their excesses, soften their hard edges, polish whatever an armada of editors and publicists deem unsightly till it sparkles.”

It’s a dream assignment. Former Senator Dorothy Gibson, aka that woman, is the most talked-about person in the country right now, though largely for the wrong reasons. As an independent candidate for President of the United States, Dorothy split the vote and is being blamed for the shocking result. After her very public defeat, she’s retreated to her home in rural Maine, inviting her ghostwriter to join her.

Her collaborator is impressed by Dorothy’s work ethic and steel-trap mind, not to mention the stunning surroundings (and one particularly gorgeous bodyguard). But when a neighbor dies under suspicious circumstances, Dorothy is determined to find the killer in their midst. And when Dorothy Gibson asks if you want to team up for a top secret, possibly dangerous murder investigation, the only answer is: “Of course!”

The best ghostwriters are adept at asking questions and spinning stories . . . two talents, it turns out, that also come in handy for sleuths. Dorothy’s political career, meanwhile, has made her an expert at recognizing lies and double-dealing. Working together, the two women are soon untangling motives and whittling down suspects, to the exasperation of local police. But this investigation—much like the election—may not unfold the way anyone expects . . .
 

Release date: January 23, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

I tell other people’s stories for a living.

You can call me a ghostwriter, though usually I just say I “freelance,” which is vague and boring enough to put an end to strangers’ polite inquiries. Among friends I call myself a “lady Cyrano,” which is meant to be self-deprecating. (I have an unusually large nose.)

That’s a lie, actually. Not about my unusually large nose, but about my supposed friends. I have lots of acquaintances, and colleagues, and associates—an assortment of people who pepper my existence so that if you saw me from the outside, you’d think my life was perfectly full. There are times it seems full even to me. But the truth is I don’t have any friends. Not the kind I always pictured having: friends so close, they’re family.

Oh—I don’t have a family, either. We decided years ago it would be best if we stopped talking. I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because I want—I have—to be honest. It’s the only way this is going to work.

Ghostwriting is not about honesty. It’s about strategy. A good ghostwriter will manipulate a story for purposes of maximum engagement. And I am a very good ghostwriter. My specialty is memoir. I tell the inspirational life stories of outrageously successful people: actors, athletes, politicians. Assholes, in other words (though I guess that’s just one word). I make the assholes likeable and interesting. Like a sculptor, I carve out something beautiful from the rough-hewn block of their existence, and then polish it till it sparkles. You may think of me as a professional bullshit artist, but I love what I do. Ghostwriting has been around since there were stories to tell. I’ve always been a snoop where other people are concerned, and I discovered in my late twenties I have a knack for spinning tales about them, and for making these tales sing.

But I refuse to strategize or manipulate here. This isn’t about some celebrity overcoming the odds, and there’s no need for me to sell you anything. Because somehow, I managed to get myself wrapped up in an honest-to-goodness murder mystery. And for once?

The story’s all mine.

It started with a phone call.

This wasn’t the way things usually started. My agent, Rhonda, almost always e-mails me, knowing I prefer to keep my interactions limited to the written sphere whenever possible. (If I could send her handwritten notes on creamy stationery sealed with wax, I would, though at this point e-mail is pretty much the equivalent of a feather quill and ink pot, anyway.) If a phone call were absolutely necessary, she’d schedule it ahead of time. And yet here she was, calling me unannounced.

One of the few happy outcomes of the so-called Digital Revolution is that no one is expected to answer their phone anymore. So I stared at her name on my screen, allowing the vibrations to run up my arm while noting how smudged the glass was—almost greasy. Apparently I needed to wash my face more. I was still waiting for a voice mail when her text came through.

Call me back ASAP.

Uh-oh. The cortisol began chugging its way through my midsection like Drano through that U-shaped pipe in one of those animated commercials. But then, because she knows me so well, Rhonda sent a follow-up.

Good news, not bad.

Her assistant patched me through immediately.

“Well, well, well,” she began. I could hear a whipping sound, which meant she was doing squats or lunges or something equally horrifying behind her standing desk. Rhonda is one of those overachievers who doesn’t know when to quit. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

“Why is it that I’m being forced to hear the sound of your voice right now?” Rhonda likes to spar—probably because it burns more calories than regular talking. “You know how I hate that.”

She laughed—a throaty, rasping sound that would make you think she smoked if you didn’t know she ran several marathons a year. Rhonda’s laugh is what sealed the deal when she was courting me as a client. I’ve always maintained you can tell a lot about people by the way they laugh. Someone should create a dating app where all you have to do is upload an audio feed of yourself laughing, none of this “I like to take long walks on the beach” crap.

“Apparently that winning personality of yours has been doing you favors about town,” she said.

“Which town? This town?”

I was in D.C. at the moment, finishing up a heartwarming bildungsroman à la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. My client was a senator who wanted to be president someday—a family man who’d made no fewer than three passes at me during our time together. I’d managed not to stab or shiv or otherwise maim him, so I suppose my personality had been rather winning.

“In a way. Not that you need to stay in D.C. for this one, I know you’re crushed.”

I’ve never much liked D.C., a city provincial enough to be subsumed by a single preoccupation—much like its soul sister on the opposite coast, L.A. It was my great misfortune that so many of my projects tended to take me to either “metropolis,” and yes, those are air quotes I’m using. My heart will always remain in New York City, along with my permanent address.

“Where to this time?”

“North,” she said.

“North?”

“Way north.”

“Is it Santa?” I asked breathlessly.

“The thing is”—she was getting out of breath herself—“we need to move fast.”

“Who is this person?” I asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“What do you think?”

I was in fact lying down in a king-size bed at the Four Seasons, with three fluffy pillows behind my back. I moved my laptop from off my bare thighs, where the battery heat was beginning to burn them. Often I get a good hour or two of work done this way, while still in bed. Hey, it worked for Edith Wharton. Why not me?

The whipping noise stopped, which meant Rhonda had gone stationary—her version of a drumroll.

“It’s Dorothy Gibson.”

If my life were a movie trailer, this is where the needle would have scratched the record.

Dorothy. Freaking. Gibson.

Her middle name is Chase, of course, not Freaking. Actually, Chase is her maiden name. But you already knew that.

This was a big get, a far cry from the first memoir I worked on—practically for free—about the CEO of a golf ball manufacturing company who overcame a number of addictions. (Title: Whole, in One. I tried to talk him out of it. I really did.)

“Hello? Did you just have a stroke?”

When I spoke, my voice echoed because I was already in the bathroom turning on the shower.

“Tell me everything.”

Rhonda let loose another of her fantastic laughs.

Three hours later, I was in the air, doing my best not to brain the teenager YouTubing his little heart out next to me, sans headphones. I was headed to Maine, scheduled in the afternoon for what Rhonda liked to call “the official sniffing of the butts.” Since writing a memoir is such a personal endeavor, most clients like to feel out their collaborator before committing. It goes both ways, of course, and I’d gotten to the point in my career where I had no problem walking away when my gut advised me to abandon ship. You know how sometimes when you go on a first date and you see the person across the room, and you just know before you even reach the table that it’s not going to work? I’d had similar experiences with clients, though I had no intention of feeling this way about Dorothy Gibson. As Rhonda put it:

“Her butt will smell like roses. And you better make sure yours does too.”

“I am not throwing away my shot,” I promised her.

Dorothy’s people had offered to fly me on a private jet, but I declined. While I’d like to pretend this had everything to do with the environment, mainly it was due to my fear of irony. A private plane is two hundred times more likely to crash than a commercial one, and if that’s the way I’m going to go, I’d like my fiery death to be an unmitigated tragedy rather than one of those situations where people say I had it coming to me, you know?

A book sat open in my lap: a bestselling novel everyone seemed to love except me, which is often how these things go. Usually I’d be doing some light research on my potential client—enough so that I didn’t embarrass myself, not so much that I’d begin forming any major biases. But in this case there was no research necessary, no hope of avoiding preconceived notions. Better to be upfront about whatever bias I was bringing to the project, I decided, and review what I knew about Dorothy Gibson—or at least, what I thought I knew.

She’d been famous for so long, her fame came in phases. There was Early Dorothy, the modest homemaker from Small Town, USA (technically Skowhegan, Maine), who married her high school sweetheart, the handsome and charismatic Edward Gibson. With great reluctance, Dorothy allowed him to drag her and their newborn son to Washington in 1981, where Edward became the youngest member of the 97th Congress, not so much a rising as a shooting star—which made his death a few months into his second term all the more shocking. The official cause was—and still is—a heart attack, but there were whispers about a drug overdose, and the suggestion that good ol’ Eddie Gibson wasn’t as squeaky clean as his image led people to believe. Whether or not his wife was one of those believers was a question pondered behind many a closed door (this was pre-Internet, remember), but Dorothy never said a word against him. She finished out his term, a latter-day instance of the political tradition of “widow’s succession” or “widow’s mandate,” in which a surviving wife is used as a placeholder while the party machine lands on a suitable (ahem, male) replacement to run in the next election. (I jotted down “Widow’s Succession” as a possible title in the Notes app on my phone.)

There’s an iconic photo of her from this time—you’ve seen it, trust me—where she’s squatting on the front steps of the Capitol in a billowy black blouse and high-waisted slacks, feeding her toddler son orange slices out of a brown paper sack. Everyone loved her back then, as hard as that is to imagine now. She wasn’t a threat, wasn’t really part of the game. But then like many of the widows who refused to leave once they got a foothold, Dorothy flourished in Washington, despite—or as she would argue for the rest of her career, because of—her initial distaste for it. She served several of her own terms in the House before pivoting to the Senate, where she built a reputation as a centrist willing to cross the aisle to get the job done. For my money, Early Dorothy lasted all the way through her Congressional years, from the eighties into the nineties and the first half of the aughts. Middle Dorothy came into her own when she was tapped to run as vice president with the war veteran John Murphy, a man who badly needed the bump in publicity a female veep brought him. Her credentials were impeccable, but the scrutiny of her appearance was both nasty and nonstop: whole articles were written about the cost of her designer outfits, the time spent styling her hair. Some even took issue with her reading glasses, which were made in South Korea rather than the U.S. All in all, it was a disastrous campaign that ended in a walloping at the polls. Plus, she’d been forced to relinquish her post as senator. But this turned out to be a blessing; it freed up her time for frequent television appearances as a talking head, and speaking engagements for which she charged a hefty fee. For the first time in her life, she began to make money—a lot of it. Dorothy Gibson became a fixture in the political firmament, an elder stateswoman whose opinion on pretty much everything was solicited regularly.

And then, about two years ago, she officially entered her Late Period, becoming even more famous (or do I mean notorious?) by drawing on her personal fortune and running for president. As an Independent, mind you. If anyone was going to pull this off, it was Dorothy; she had always been hard to pin down on any issue, and there were countless votes in the Senate in which she was the only member of her party to join the other side. And, of course, she nearly did pull it off, garnering a third of the popular vote in one of the most fractured and bruising elections in history. As I sat there on the plane, the election had taken place just three weeks earlier and the country was still reeling from the shock. Dorothy’s participation had thrown the usual two-party proceedings into chaos, and one of the few things everyone seemed to be able to agree on while the smoke cleared was that she was at least partially responsible for the unlikely election of . . . well, you-know-who.

My loathing of politics had kept me from regarding Dorothy Gibson with either the adulation or the aversion she inspired in so many. But there was no question she had a story to tell, especially at this point in time. After her concession speech, she’d fled back to Maine, holing herself up in the mansion she’d bought a few years earlier. Up till now the only books she’d published were policy oriented and dry. Talk of a memoir had started circulating in the book world almost immediately. People were angry at her, but they also wanted to hear from her. She’d tried to be the bridge between two warring sides, and that bridge had collapsed. Spectacularly. Now we all wanted to gawk at the destruction, and who better to gawk alongside than the one at the center of it all?

We’re all rubberneckers at heart, as much as we’d like to pretend otherwise.

The flight from D.C. took less than two hours. The sky was perfectly clear, which was a shame because I like flying above a thick cloud cover and feeling smug about the sunshine I wouldn’t be enjoying if I were still on the face of the earth. But it meant I got a bird’s-eye view of the greater Portland area as we made our descent.

The inky waters off the coastline looked cold and forbidding, as no doubt they were. It was late November, after all. The land was thick with trees, and if it had been a few weeks earlier, there’s no question I’d have been blown away by the fall foliage. Except for a healthy smattering of evergreens, the trees were all naked now, their bare branches blending into a dusty gray that led unbroken to the edges of man-made clearings and small bodies of water—black lakes that looked like Swiss cheese holes from up here, rivers flashing at me like dental floss made of metal.

Dorothy’s house was in Sacobago, an upscale suburb of Portland. (That’s Sock-o-BAGE-oh, with a hard g, emphasis on the third syllable. Wouldn’t want you mispronouncing our setting the whole way through like I would have—mispronunciation being a common hazard among avid readers as opposed to avid talkers. I still haven’t gotten over the fact that “vague” is one syllable and “chaos” is two.) There were some Mainers who grumbled that she’d betrayed her roots by settling in the south, having been raised in the rustic north. Technically, her hometown of Skowhegan was in the middle of the state, but there was no denying it was culturally closer to the north than tony Sacobago. The north/south divide was a whole thing in Maine, as I’d learned earlier via some furious googling.

We landed and deplaned without incident. I wheeled my suitcase through the passenger terminal of the Portland International Jetport, which was definitely protesting too much with that “International.” I actually love small airports; they’re a throwback to a time when flying was streamlined and exciting, not the soulless logistical nightmare it is today. This one had a lot of character: the ceiling was made of exposed wood stained a rich, honeyed brown. I felt like I was in a massive log cabin, which was as good a start to a stint in Maine as any I could imagine.

I suppose I could pretend it was such a drag having to hurry from one gig to another like this with no time in between. But the truth is I prefer working to not. I also love taking public transportation—love killing time in public spaces, love everything about traveling because it affords me the opportunity of observing others, but never at the expense of having to interact with them. Sometimes I think if there’s a Heaven, it looks exactly like an airport terminal: a vast room in which everyone gets to exist “together alone,” always on the brink of something new, forever luxuriating in a blissful state of anticipation.. . .

I put on the flimsy windbreaker I’d shed on the plane. Even inside the terminal, it was noticeably colder here than in D.C. I’d been told someone would be waiting for me, and I scanned the small crowd gathered near the baggage claim, disappointed that none of them was holding a piece of paper with my name on it, because I always get a kick out of that. Figuring someone would approach me sooner or later, I began hunting for a coffee shop, which was when I caught sight of a woman I recognized.

It wasn’t Dorothy Gibson. Pfft, you think Dorothy Gibson fetches ghostwriters from airports? I knew this woman by sight because Dorothy Gibson was so famous, even her personal aide had become a news fixture by then.

Leila Mansour had a sophisticated appeal that was a product of style rather than beauty. I’ve always preferred this brand of attractiveness, which relies on qualities acquired rather than inherited: an accomplishment, as opposed to an accident of nature. This meant I could apply any tricks I picked up from such people to myself (#dontstopbelievin). I watched as Leila clip-clopped her way toward me in tan calf-length boots—the focal point of her otherwise low-key, black ensemble. She seemed to be wearing no makeup other than a pop of bright red lipstick, though I suspected she was simply good at applying makeup. Her parents had emigrated from Egypt, and though she’d been born and raised in New Jersey, her first language was Arabic—a fact that hadn’t gone unobserved by fringe conspiracy theorists who once objected to her security clearance, claiming baselessly she had ties to terrorist organizations. She did not. What she did have was long, silky hair that was truly black. She wore it loose, flowing over one shoulder.

I was surprised Leila and not some underling had come for me, because even though she was an aide, she was more of a policy wonk, a “right-hand man” factotum as opposed to a proper assistant. I was reasonably sure that if Dorothy had won the election, Leila Mansour would have had a senior advisory role in the administration. But now here she was on airport pickup duty.

She was also carrying two coffees to go. These cups were so gigantic, they looked more like thermoses. Or fire extinguishers. She stopped in front of me, grinning as if we were old friends reuniting at last.

“I promise I was five minutes early, but then I decided we could both probably use one of these.”

I was struck by the brightness of her pointy teeth, and realized I’d never seen her open her mouth before. At press conferences she played the “good wife” role, standing silently by Dorothy’s side. If she ever needed to tell her boss anything, she’d lean in and whisper it in her ear.

“Please don’t feel like you have to drink it. I know afternoon coffee isn’t for everyone. I could easily have both of these.”

I assured her I was all about the p.m. caffeine, relieving her of one of the cookie jars. When I took a sip, I was pleased to note it was exactly the way I liked it—a tablespoon-size dollop of cream (yes, I’ve measured it), no sugar.

“How did you know how I take my coffee?” I asked, playing up the wonder in my voice. I was no stranger to the extraordinary—sometimes alarming—lengths the assistants of famous people will go to make a good impression. But I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.

“I have my ways,” she replied, wiggling her shapely eyebrows. (I’d learn later she simply texted Senator Handsy’s assistant.) She eyed my jacket. “You have anything heavier than that?”

I shook my head. “I came here straight from D.C.”

She sucked in through her teeth. “We’ll have to remedy that. Motto up here isn’t so much ‘Winter is coming’ as ‘Winter never left.’ But then I’m a total wimp when it comes to the cold. Let’s walk fast, I’m not parked far.”

I hurried after her, forcing myself not to react when the coffee slopped out of the little hole in the lid and scalded the side of my index finger.

Leila drove a nice yet nondescript sedan: a Honda Accord, or maybe a Toyota Corolla, something like that. I wouldn’t know because I take pride in not caring about cars. She set her coffee on the roof, fishing for her keys with long fingers that tapered like candlesticks.

“So how’s she doing?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “You mean, is she in her sweats binging TV shows between walks in the woods?”

“Something like that.”

I’d of course seen the famous photo of Dorothy Gibson in the woods near her house, posing with an adorable dad hiking with his adorable baby. Like everyone, I’d wondered what she’d been up to in those first few days after the election, when most people would have curled into a ball and cowered under the covers.

“Nah, she’s already back at it.” Leila held up her keys, pressing a button. The car chirped back at us. “That’s why you’re here.”

I made a point of sitting in the front passenger seat. There are some professional drivers (especially older, male ones) who interpret this as a belittlement of their livelihood and take offense. But Leila wasn’t a professional driver, and she was making a big show of being friendly. Whether the friendliness was real or not didn’t matter; it was in my best interests to reciprocate.

“Just so you know”—she turned to me, one hand slung over the steering wheel—“I’m the one who recommended you for this job. I’m a big fan. I love what you did with Daisy’s story. So powerful.”

I thanked her profusely, which is the only way I can think to get out of these situations without ducking my head or otherwise acting like an insecure teenager. Daisy Lester was a fiftysomething actress whose memoir of extraordinary personal and professional struggle had come out two years earlier. It hadn’t been a massive bestseller or anything, but it had gotten noticed in the right circles, and I’d been working steadily ever since. I’d had no idea while I was writing it what a boon it would be to my career, but then that’s often the way of these things. It definitely boosted my profile. As Rhonda put it: “You’re in the big leagues now, slugger.”

“So feel free to ask me anything you want.” Leila lifted her paper-towel roll of coffee from the well between us, taking a generous swig. “It’s in both our interests for this interview to go well.”

I appreciated her directness. It’s rarer than you’d think.

“What should I call her?”

“Dorothy is fine. No need to be formal, she knows that’s what everyone calls her. On a good day.”

“Am I right in thinking this is going to be much more of a personal book than anything she’s written before?”

“Yep, full-on memoir. No one would shut up during the campaign about how she’s not open enough. So let’s give the people what they want. Jerks.”

“Are we talking exposé slash tell-all level? Dorothy lets us know what she really thinks about her two opponents, et cetera? Or more of a retrospective, lie-down-and-let-mommy-tell-you-what-it-was-like-when-she-was-younger sort of thing?”

She rotated her head toward me on her sylph-like neck, regarding me with an astonished expression. For a second I thought I’d gone too far, but then her red lips parted and to my relief, I saw she was smiling.

“Up to you. Between us I’d prefer it to be more of the former, but she’ll almost definitely nudge it in the latter direction.”

“Timeline?”

“Yesterday?” She tossed her head, flicking her hair from off her shoulder the way an animated pony might have. “That’s pretty much the deadline for everything in Dorothyland. She’s the hardest worker I know, and I’m including myself when I say that.”

She let out a self-conscious laugh to let me know she didn’t actually think that highly of herself (incontrovertible proof that she did).

“It’s why we want you to live in the house, which I realize is an imposition.”

It was one of my hard-and-fast rules never to embed with a client. There had been an unfortunate incident involving a record executive who clearly thought my acceptance of his invitation to stay in his home—along with his grown daughter, I might add—meant I wanted to have sex with him. After disabusing him of this notion, the deal fell through.

“It’s fine,” I assured her. Because rules are made to be broken (didn’t you know?), and even if it wasn’t fine, I could always renege later, whereas any reservations up front might sour relations from the get-go. “More than fine. I realize what an amazing opportunity this is.”

One of the revelations of my adult life has been the discovery that more often than not, playing it “cool” or “hard to get” does you no favors. Most people want enthusiasm, and validation; they crave warmth, espe. . .