Liz Abbott is content with her life in the small town of Port Gamble. She's built a life for herself and her daughter in the small seaside town. She works at the local grocery store and has a unique talent for communicating with the dead. The town's most recent dead person, however, is proving as difficult in death as she did in life. Emily Ruth Griffin dropped dead in the produce aisle after tasting Liz's cheese whiz on crackers. Now she's back and haunting everyone, leaving cryptic clues to her murder.

The main suspect in Emily Ruth's murder is her ex-husband, Lucas Griffin. When he and Liz begin seeing one another, she's also at the top of the suspect list. Emily Ruth continues to leave clues to her demise, and Liz must figure them out and identify the real murderer before she's next on the killer's hit list, or she and Lucas end up in jail, charged with a crime neither committed!

THE FOREVER SUMMER by Suzanne Macpherson is a pleasant romantic who-done-it that's a bit light on both mystery and romance. Liz is tortured by her past as a teenaged parent and unwilling to trust the "summer people," of which Lucas is one. Lucas has been burned by love once, by the suitably unsympathetic Emily Ruth, and not enthusiastic about hooking up with another woman, yet he and Liz do manage to connect. It was obvious to me from the beginning who the killer was, and the clues left by Emily Ruth simply reinforced my belief and left me wondering why Liz was being so dense. There was a nice twist thrown in at the end, but overall I missed the wow-factor I've enjoyed in other books by Ms. Macpherson.