One Night in Drake Mansion
Skeptic Detective Book 1
by Channing Whitaker
Six Missing, Five Dead, and One Night to Unravel the Mystery
Eighty years ago, a wealthy family returned home from a magic show, after which neither they nor the magician, Malvern Kamrar, were ever heard from again. When several bystanders died in their mansion, the house was sealed. After nearly a century of rumors and haunted stories, the mansion will be opened for a live TV event, allowing five contestants to spend one night and win their share of a million dollars.
The contestants: a psychic, a high-tech ghost hunter, a Hollywood scream queen, a local woman, and a paranormal skeptic named Harlan Holt fuel excitement as each tries to solve the mystery. Upon entering the journal of the family patriarch, Vinton Drake is discovered, illuminating the puzzle, rooted all the way back to Vinton’s service as a medic in WWI when he first met the magician.
Departing from the familiar haunted house tale, this story explores the very nature of belief in the supernatural with consequences more frightening than any ghost story. Intensity soars when the contestants discover their lives, and thousands more, are in genuine peril. Is the mansion haunted? What fate befell Malvern and the Drake family? And will the contestants uncover the truth in time to save themselves…
One Night in Drake Mansion is the first book in Whitaker’s Skeptic Detective Series.
REVIEW
5 out of 5
What a great way to kick off a new series. Mystery meets haunted house in this unique paranormal cross-genre book. I love how the mystery was woven in with strange occurrences and a reality show that aims to (hopefully) uncover the solution to the mystery. There were some nice twists, just when I thought I knew where the story was going, Whitaker changed direction. The characters were diverse and interesting, and each brought their own flavoring to the book. Highly recommend for mystery lovers looking for a few chills, and all horror lovers!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Channing Whitaker is a novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker originally hailing from Centerville, Iowa. An alum of Indian Hills Community College, Channing went on to study cinema, screenwriting, literature, and mathematics at the University of Iowa. His college years were also spent tending bar and in bar security, which he considers a valuable study of humanity, and an indispensable supplement to his formal education.
Post graduation, Channing began his career in the production of television news, independent films, and commercial videos, as well as writing for websites, corporate media, and advertising. His career has taken Channing from Iowa to Texas, Alaska, Oklahoma, and to California where he currently resides.
Channing is a fan of many media forms and genres. He considers himself a storyteller foremost and works in multiple media and genres himself. Channing’s artistic influences include Trevanian, Gene Roddenberry, Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Altman, though he credits his late father, a psychology professor, with profoundly impacting his approach to the deep, conflicted, and multifaceted characters which drive his stories.
In his home life, Channing is a father of two, a sports lover, and a real-life space exploration enthusiast.
Channing is among a small subset of writers who are also dyslexic. He considers learning to overcome the challenges of this diagnosis to have aided him in persevering amid the rejection-filled, uncertain, and competitive fields of writing and screenwriting.
