"The Fate of Mercy Alban" by Wendy Webb (Hyperion, $15.99): If you're craving a good old-fashioned ghost story to scare you on these cold nights, this is it. There's a big house with secret passages (think Glensheen in Duluth), a body that may have left the crypt, a beautiful apparition dancing on the lakeshore in the moonlight, a hidden manuscript, a book of curses and an old relative who may be insane.

Grace Alban, divorced mother of a teenage daughter, hasn't been near her family's supposedly cursed mansion on Lake Superior for years. When Grace's mother dies, she has to return to the big house from which her aunt, Fate Alban, disappeared during a 1956 solstice party.

That was the same night a party guest, famous writer David Coleville, committed suicide. Grace and her friend, pastor Matthew Parker, discover the manuscript of a novel written by Coleville in which he reveals his relationship to the house and to Grace's mother and her family.

When Grace's aged and frail aunt arrives, taken from a Swiss facility without permission by an eager journalist, the plot becomes more complicated.

Is this woman really Fate? Or is it Fate's sister, Mercy, whose body lies in the family crypt? And what malevolent entity is after Grace's daughter? How is the young woman affected by a centuries-old book of spells brought over from Ireland?

As Grace deals with her own fears, she and Matthew read Coleville's manuscript, creating a story within a story that recalls events of years past and explains the Alban curse.

Webb, editor in chief of Duluth Superior Magazine, won a Minnesota Book Award for her ghostly 2010 debut novel, "The Tale of Halcyon Crane."

She will introduce her novel from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Feb. 6 at the Dock Cafe, 425 Nelson St. E., Stillwater, during Valley Bookseller's Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour (reservations, 651-430-3385); 7 p.m. Feb. 12 at SubText bookstore, Selby and Western avenues, St. Paul; 7 p.m. Feb. 13 at Hamline Midway Library, 1558 W. Minnehaha Ave., St. Paul, in Friends of the St. Paul Public Library's Fireside Reading series; and March 6 at Common Good Books, 39 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul, with Erin Hart reading from her forthcoming mystery, "The Book of Killowen."

"Minnesota's Oldest Murder Mystery -- The Case of Edward Phalen: St. Paul's Unsaintly Pioneer" by Gary Brueggemann (Beaver's Pond Press, $19.95): His name is all over St. Paul: Lake Phalen, Phalen Boulevard, Phalen Ice Arena.

But St. Paul pioneer Ed Phalen was not a nice man. St. Paulite Brueggemann, who teaches history at Century and Inver Hills community colleges, argues convincingly that Phalen committed one of the young city's first murders when he killed Sgt. John Hays in 1839. Phalen's guilt, however, was never proved.

Phalen, who lived in St. Paul from 1838 to 1850, resided in a small cabin with Hays. The men couldn't have been more different.

Phalen was described as "immoral, cruel, revengeful and unscrupulous."

Hays, who was older, was a gentleman with a sterling reputation at Fort Snelling and among the settlers living in cabins strung along the bluffs above the river.

The two men probably came together because Phalen was in a position to buy land, while Hays, who financed the deal, served out his deployment at the fort.

Hays' battered body was found on a September day by some Dakota Indian boys, washed up along the shore of the Mississippi near what was then called Carver's Cave.

Why Phalen became so enraged he would kill his partner is something that can only be speculated about. The only record is from the papers of Joseph Brown, justice of the peace in a mostly lawless time when one-eyed Pig's Eye Parrant still sold booze, and white men and Indians traveled by canoe. From 1831 to 1841, Brown was the only legal civilian authority for St. Paul, which was known as Pig's Eye until 1841.

Brueggemann was researching Brown at the Minnesota Historical Society when he found a box of Brown's papers that included the long-lost record of the Phalen murder case. Unfortunately, Brown's handwriting was difficult to decipher, and there were big gaps in the narrative.

Brueggemann carefully lays out the facts in the case, including what was known of Phalen's movements the day of the killing and testimony from the people with whom he interacted. Much of the conjecture hinges on Phalen's story that he had rowed Hays across the river, although witnesses contradicted his story.

Brueggemann said he had "no strong predisposition for or against Edward Phalen." But his meticulous and years-long research gave him enough confidence to include an interesting chapter, really a short story, reconstructing what happened to Hays, including Phalen's thought processes and his attempts at a cover-up.

Phalen was arrested and charged with murder, but he was released and eventually became an affluent pioneer who won some respect.

Discussing the Stillwater Convention of 1848, to which Phalen was a delegate, Brueggemann writes:

"To think that one of these founding father delegates was a man like Edward Phalen -- the 'immoral,' 'unscrupulous ruffian' whom a preponderance of evidence points to as a brutal murderer -- is to ponder one of the strange but true facts of Minnesota history."

"Minnesota's Oldest Murder Mystery" is so interesting, so gracefully and carefully written, it is another indication that self-publishing has come of age.

Brueggemann will talk about his book at 7 p.m. Feb. 21 at Common Good Books, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

"Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel" by Susan Fedorko (Outskirts Press, $12.95): This poignant story of a Minnesota woman who found her birth parents is also self-published, and what a story it is.

Susan, nicknamed Cricket, had always known she was adopted by Lloyd and Virginia Smith and that she was American Indian. She tried to find her birth parents when she was 18, with no luck. In 2002, when Susan was a 40-year-old wife and mother, she was contacted by a half-sister. To her amazement, she learned her birth mother, Catherine Veronica Dahmen, was the first American Indian supermodel.

Cathee Dahmen, who was part of the Ford Agency's 1960s roster that included Twiggie, Lauren Hutton, Jean Shrimpton and Naomi Sims, made lots of money posing for such fashion publications as Elle magazine. She was married to British actor Leroy Winter and, later, to musician Adam Merrick.

"(Cathee) appeared on countless fashion magazine covers, yet she had the ability to never appear the same way twice in any of her photos," Susan writes about the mother she never knew. "Her dark brown hair and dark brown eyes gave her an exotic air. She could look like your average American girl in one shot, then Asian or Italian or Native American in the next."

Cathee was only 16 when she had Susan, who never learned who persuaded the young mother to give up her daughter for adoption. Susan also found that her biological father, Tom Conklin, an Ojibwe born at White Earth, was deceased.

Susan weaves her story of finding her biological parents' extended families into her personal story of a happy childhood during which she always felt a sense of not belonging, even though she was loved by her parents. She is happily married to Tim Fedorko, with whom she has two daughters.

Another happy note in Susan's story is that she was welcomed by her relatives, who never forgot her and always considered her part of their families. She learned her artistic talent may have been inherited from her maternal great-uncle, artist George Morrison, who was living in Minnesota when he died in 2000.

Susan admits she has conflicted feelings about her mother, who was enrolled in the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa-Ojibwe.

Cathee died of emphysema in 1997 in Princeton, Minn., only about 50 miles from the Metrodome, where Susan was attending a Rolling Stones concert. Susan never knew her mother lived just a 60-minute drive from the Twin Cities.

"(Cathee) has been gone fifteen-plus years now, and yet I still feel the warmth of her spirit," Susan writes. "In time I believe I'll be able to forgive her. I still get angry with her, and when I do, I drive like a mad woman into the city and park my car outside of the house I grew up in ... being there calms me and allows my doubts and stormy troubles to pass ... I know that no matter what I am called, I am more than a name ... No matter what I am called, I know I am loved."
